Baby Winters

An excerpt from the book

“Transitions”

By Encore’s Director of Environmental Services

 Robert Milstid

Baby Winters

My trip to the beach was just what I needed to get back in the groove and to start forward thinking again. I was feeling like my old self and relating to the residents at Blue Lakes as I did in the earlier days when I started. Thankfully I’m past the germ-a-phobic stage and can now give myself more fully to my job. I want to be more instrumental in helping the residents through their transitional stages, or at least try to understand them better so I can communicate more on their level. Yes, I know that my job is keeping the building’s maintenance in order and running the housekeeping department, but I feel a higher calling. I want to matter in this day-to-day life. We never know how much time we have so giving all we have seems appropriate. Working with the people in memory care centers is not like any other place. You can’t ignore what’s happening around you, and believe me, there is plenty going on around you.

Baby Winters, one of our residents, has gone into a new phase or level in her Alzheimer’s. The plastic doll that she held was the love of her life and in her mind, nothing short of truly alive. The other associates and I knew to treat Miss Baby’s doll with kid gloves. It was an important key to keeping her content; for several weeks before the doll was introduced we noticed that Miss Baby had gone downhill in her motor skills and her speech patterns were getting irregular. She took to moaning and whimpering on an ongoing basis. She would cry out that she needed to go home or she needed her yellow bike. She would walk the entire building from one end to another constantly yelling out that she wanted to go home. She would stand by the front door and stare out as if waiting for her ride. “Where’s my yellow bike!” That was the phrase I remember the most; it was getting so bad that we could no longer allow her to be with the rest of the residents because she would upset the others with her constant whimpering and yelling. She was not trying to be disruptive; in her mind she knew what she wanted, but when the staff would try to console her she would quickly get louder and louder.

Thankfully all of that changed. I remember the day the activities director came in with a newly purchased baby doll. It was a girl doll in pink clothing and big blue eyes. It was love at first sight for Miss Baby and her new baby doll. She was almost immediately transformed into a nurturing state. She must have longed for a time when she herself was a mother; or maybe she never even had children, I honestly never knew. It was the medicine she needed though.  How ironic that this lady’s name was really Baby. I suppose it could’ve been a nickname from way back, but that’s the name she came in with, Baby Winters. She had progressed in the many stages of Alzheimer’s right before our eyes. The progression was at times hard to watch. She would stay at a certain level and you would begin to think that that was how it would be and then without notice she would transition to another stage. The transitions seemed to be escalating more quickly these days. The plastic baby had come to represent her own child. She talked to it, protected it, and loved it with everything she had. She had retained her natural sense of humor and wit through the course of her time with us here at Blue Lakes; just when you thought her mind was going downhill she would interject herself into the middle of someone’s conversation and say something completely poignant and relevant to what they were saying. That always fascinated me. It taught me to never write any one of our residents off, not that I or anyone else would, but I could never tell where they were at in their dementia because the stages would sometimes overlap leaving one skill behind while another set of skills were sharp as a steak knife. I suspect the nurses higher up the food chain had a better handle on what level she was at, but I’m a handyman not a nurse. I do pay attention though.

When I would arrive in the mornings soon after she had received her new baby, she would be sitting in one of the lobby chairs next to the front door. When I would enter the building she greeted me with the same thing most every morning; she would say, “It’s about time you got back here.”

“Yes ma’am,” I would say to her, “How’s the kid?”

“Oh she’s just fine, she cried most of the night but she seems fine now.”

Her versions of how the night went would vary from day to day but our conversations always started out the same. It was like staring in my own version of the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. It was a pleasant way to come in to work each day. Time went on and Baby Winters continued in her transitions; we were all happy to have her with us. She brought us hope in seeing that we were able to help her through her crying stage and into the role of a mother. Who knows, maybe the cure is right around the corner. Maybe it will be revealed and brought out of the darkness and into the light. I think it will.

Transitions is available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle!