Scenario 1:
I came home from clinical rotations the other day to find
my five month old lying on her back on our bed with my husband leaning over
her.
“What’s up, babe?” I asked as I breezed into the room.
“Watch this,” he whispered.
I looked over to see Raedyn combing carefully through his
beard with both hands—very gently, with a look of intense concentration on her
little face.
“She does this for like an hour every day,” Jon
confessed. “I’m kind of afraid to shave—what if she doesn’t love me anymore?!”
Ah, babies. They learn so early on how to train their big
humans…
Scenario 2:
A good number of my clinical rotations involve rounding
in nursing homes to assess the health of some completely adorable and yet
surprisingly feisty little grandmas and grandpas. Sometimes nursing homes are
like having a front-row seat to a bunch of adult sized kindergarteners and
their drama.
There is one duo in particular who crack me up on a regular
basis. Resident A in this room has very severe dementia, and very little of
what she says makes any sense. She asks a lot of questions, but doesn’t
remember what she said 30 seconds ago anyway, so she’s easily redirected.
Resident B in this room is significantly more
alert and oriented—she tells me frequently with smug satisfaction that she
still “has all her marbles.” (Although she tells me this SO frequently that I’m
beginning to wonder if some of those marbles might not be rolling away.)
Resident B is greatly annoyed by what she terms the “gibbering
idiot” of a roommate that she is forced to put up with, but her way of handling
it is what cracks me up.
You see, Resident A will frequently lie in her bed during
naptime or at night and ask very loudly, “God? God, is that you?!”
At which point, Resident B will holler from behind the
curtain that divides their room: “This is God! Shut up!”
And Resident A will look amazed that she has just been
visited by the Divine Himself. Her little mouth drops open a few centimeters,
and then she says, “Oh! Thank you, God!”
At which point Resident B chuckles like a naughty little school
girl and goes back to watching her television in relative peace.
