I hate to sound shallow, but I really did not want to see a naked old lady. That was it. And it wasn't a situation where I could help her into the tub, close the curtain, and be done with it. She wanted somebody to give her a sponge bath while she sat on a plastic chair in the shower. I appreciate her desire to be clean, but I knew that experience would make my eyeballs dirty.
When we moved in, one of the stipulations I placed on our cohabitation with Auntie was that we would not deal with any bathroom activities. No helping her on the toilet, no helping her in the tub, and (should it come up for some reason) I wasn't too keen on helping her brush her teeth either. During our opening interview with the home healthcare service, both Raz and I answered the question of whether we would like a caregiver to bathe her with a resounding “Yes.” In unison.
The “bath ladies”, as Auntie calls them, are all lovely women (and some men, though we haven't met one) with a wide range of personalities, ages, races, and names. Despite Raz and I making a concerted effort to learn the name of each home health aide, Auntie refers to all of them as though they were the same individual with a severe case of multiple personality disorder. Her memory gets noticeably worse every day, but she still has trouble realizing it. Any attempt to draw out information her brain had erased would result in her accusing us of lying, as though we were somehow playing a prank on her by suggesting that any of these women were different. When asked by her case manager to rate her satisfaction with the bath service, getting her to even acknowledge that she had met multiple people was more difficult than getting a complete roster of Auschwitz from a Holocaust denier. These were people, and I can't stress this enough, who had spent time with her while she was naked.
The first morning after Auntie had come home from the rehab facility, Auntie demanded that we give her a bath. I told her that would be impossible, reminding her that the doctors and nurses who had bid her farewell less than twenty four hours prior had deemed it unsafe. She relied heavily on a walker for mobility, and had significant difficulty getting in and out of chairs. And even though she has improved (physically only, mind you) since then, she still does have trouble moving around. Not only were we unprepared for the trauma of seeing Auntie in the nude, but there was the terrifying potential that we might need to physically lift her frail, naked, wrinkly body into the tub. And what if she fell? With the immediate danger of her collapse, who knows what we might accidentally grab. It just wasn't going to happen.
It was our policy at the time to wait outside the bathroom door while Auntie attended to her “business”. We still weren't going to go in with her, but at least we wouldn't be far if she genuinely required help. No more than half an hour had passed since Raz and I declared a kibosh on her bathing when Auntie shuffled into the bathroom. From my post outside I heard the toilet flush, the sink running, and then...nothing. I waited through the silence, wondering what she was up to. After a pause more pregnant that Michelle Duggar, I heard the telltale groan of Auntie saying my name.
She calls me “Mel'nie”, which is odd because dropping the letter 'A' is not a result of her Canadian accent. I would chalk it up to ignorance, but surely in the past twenty-five years she's heard it properly pronounced more than a few times. But I digress.
She sounded distraught when she called me that morning, and so I poked my head around the doorframe to see what the trouble was. I saw a flash of wrinkly pink and realized in horror that she was standing in front of the bathroom sink, naked. Well, almost naked. She grumbled and grunted, struggling with the clasp of her ancient brassiere. I turned away in shock, at which point she called out “Come back here, Mel'nie, I need you to undo my bra for me.”
Resisting the urge to vomit, I begrudgingly turned back into the room and focused my attention on the small patch of skin on her back that had no other discernible “parts”. If I just kept staring at her back, I thought, it greatly reduced the risk of seeing anything else. Quickly I unhooked her bra and darted back towards the bathroom door. I still had one foot out and one foot in when she pressed a washcloth into my escaping hand. It was chilly, damp, scraggly, and altogether unpleasant. “Do my back now,” she demanded. Her tone implied that, were I not to wash her back at that moment, I would deeply regret it. What she failed to realize (and is mostly likely self-absorbed enough to never realize) is that I would deeply regret it if I did wash her back. But I wasn't in the mood to start a fight on the first day, so I did it quickly while sternly informing her that this would be the only time. Our home health aide service was starting soon, which meant that a professional would be there to help her clean herself and that I would never, ever bath her again.
Auntie still insists on bathing herself every day, and for the first week Raz and I were often tricked into washing her back. After I noticed an improvement in her arm mobility, I suggested one morning that she try washing her own back. A brief argument ensued, but I was right. She could wash her own back and we were free.
Although the bath service is fantastic, and has certainly reduced the amount of horrors that we are exposed to regularly, they are only able to come twice a week and often at unusual times. Her first bath appointment was at 3pm. Upon hearing this, Auntie frowned and stated simply “I take my baths at 8:30”. No excuses would be accepted, no explanations of the aide's busy schedule would be taken into account. Bathing so late in the day simply wasn't done. She sulked around the house in dirty clothes, claiming that it was hardly worth it to change if she would just have to take off her clothes again after lunch. When the health aide did arrive, she quipped “Who takes a bath at three in the afternoon? What am I, African?” To this day, I do not understand what she meant by this statement. And with a memory that becomes more sieve-like daily, she doesn't understand what she meant either.
Today a health aide came at 9 in the morning. This is an extremely rare treat, to be the first client on their long list of homes to visit. We had thought Auntie might be glad, but instead she focused her energy on complaining that taking a bath so early in the day would most likely overlap with her physical therapy appointment. She also chose to get up an hour and a half early (despite going to bed late the night before, but that's another story), so by the time her bath rolled around she had already been awake and active for over four hours and thus it was as good as midday – unacceptable.
I went to the grocery store around noon, and when I came home Raz informed me that he hadn't been able to shower yet because Auntie had spent the past hour giving herself a standing sponge bath in front of the sink. When I asked her why she gave herself a bath after her regular bath that morning, she grumbled and gave me a suspicious glare out of her one good eye. She had no idea what I was talking about.
She forgets things all the time, sometimes incredibly important things (again, another story for another time), but baths had always seemed to stick in her mind. People who happened to visit on bath days were usually treated to a full play-by-play of the event, whether they requested it or not (they didn't). But her mind is getting worse. She now forgets events indiscriminately, but remembers old habits obsessively. It's only a matter of time before I find her caught in an endless loop of shuffling into the bathroom, bathing herself, shuffling to her bedroom, dressing herself, and realizing that her clothes don't feel quite right and she should probably take a bath. Again and again. Lather, then rinse, then...
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