Dissention in the Ranks

So, as I have been at my job for awhile now, I have come to know certain residents nocturnal habits. What's weird is I can go there during the day and there are several people I couldn't pick out of a line up- as they rarely, if ever, call us at night. Some residents tend to call more than others... and thus far I have assigned pet names- pet ranks, in fact... mostly they are just for me to know, but any chuckle I can get at 3 a.m., no matter how small, is worth it.

Today I want to introduce you to one of our officers of Annoying.

We have Colonel Call-light. This is the one person in there who makes me want to shove a pencil in my ear. I don't know what the fuck is up with this woman. She calls, on average nine or ten times a night. She says she has to pee. She fucking lies, because she doesn't have enough urine escape her body to classify it as a proper piss... barely a tinkle. I don't think she even gets a stream going- just a drip. And she does this shit All. Night. Long. The pisser is? She is ambulatory. Perfectly capable of getting up and into her chair and to the shitter on her own... She doesn't. OH- the other piss off? If she doesn't have her call light when she goes back to bed, she freaks the fuck out- i.e yelling and screaming for help as if someone just hacked her legs off. She makes sure she has that fucking light before she worries about having blankets.

I made the mistake once of asking her if she was feeling okay, could I call the nurse for her, as it seems she wasn't sleeping very well. She said, "What do you mean?" , and I told her she had been up 7 times already, and didn't seem to be resting. She hollered at me, "I HAVE NOT! I know better than that!" Um... What the f... why would I lie? What possible motivation would I have for making shit like this up? Seriously. She also asks you to repeat things... but it seems she only goes deaf when you are saying things she doesn't want to hear. If you are saying goodnight, in an normal voice, she hears just fine and responds in kind. But say something like, "You've not slept well. You've been up often, are you okay?.", and she is suddenly deaf as a post.

Col. Call-light also has a cough. Now, when I say cough you might think a normal sounding cough... maybe even a hack resembling croup. Oh, not this woman... She sounds like she is hacking up a cat. Let me see if I can give a proper summation of this noise... mix the honk of a goose, with the sound of a child puking, and stepping on a cat's tail... turn it up to about 80 decibels, and repeat. Now, she has no infection, no virus, no nasty shit she is coughing up; no COPD, no emphysema... she just feels the compulsive need to go from what starts as a normal cough to trying to hack-scream a loogie out of her throat. And it goes on for probably 20 minutes at a time. She wakes other residents up with her horrible whole-cat-hair-balls.

I have been known to mutter to myself, under my breath, when leaving her room for the umpteenth time, "See you in 30 minutes." I know it makes me terrible... but she drives me out of my fucking mind, and last night she was especially annoying... hack, piss, hack, cough, piss, piss, and once even it the light to have me help her lay down. Odd, as she had been laying down 15 minutes earlier. And every time I go in there she insists that she needs help to sit up. ARRRRGGGHHHH! She proceeded to call me back in there 20 minutes after that saying she had to piss. Again. And she said, "I need help sitting up." Fucking lies. She also yelled at me, telling me I wasn't helping her enough- she did this while I was supporting her bony ass from her bed to her chair.

So, yeah. That's the Colonel. Not the high point of my night. Or my job. Wiping ass ain't pretty- but most of them ave the courtesy to not yell at me when I am doing it, or demanding that I do it every 40 minutes all night long.