Beware the wrath of the Punk Poofy Cat as he's been known to burn down barns, just like "Carrie" when she got pig's blood thrown in her face. I've got nowhere else but blogging to vent my spleen, making complaints to higher authorities is useless, no one listens to the whinging underlings, bosses can get away with murder, all in the name of PROFIT. Thus I have more tales of terror to tell from "The Industry of Dying." I'm annoyed with Murderith House, the nursing home that sometimes calls me in as relief nurse. The uptight Matron has excluded me because I dared to question her hiring practices, bringing in expensive agency nurses instead of in-house relief nurses like me, they cost twice as much, do half the work, and care not a fig for the dying residents. She had to take a few days off for some kind of emergency so the deputy matron called me in to replace the young Phillipino girl who's always coming down with asthma, nogod knows why she's still employed, she's always on sick leave. (Staff gossip tells me she's the Matron's niece.)
Nursing homes are cash-cows for whoever gets a hold of them. This particular night I discover the expensive agency nurse who got the really lucrative weekend shift had done no work at all, none of the reports so I can't figure out what's been going on in the joint, or the status of the deteriorating patients, nor very little actual nursing, wounds with old dressings, pressure sores worsening, not even medications given. I'm told he lay in a chair and slept all night, the old, ailing residents be dammed, he couldn't give a shit! I found poor old Katie, the 80 year old dementia sufferer, worked up into a lather, the door of her room barricaded with furniture, with her Downs Syndrome daughter wailing, hiding behind her, peeping in fear over her shoulder, both panic stricken because they thought they were under attack by decrepit strange men who they saw roaming about the corridors for the last few nights, perhaps trying to trespass into their room and out to rape them, such were their fears. I soothed their shattered nerves, assured them I was there to protect them, and got them back into bed.
I found poor sweet Henrietta wandering the corridors at 2am, dressed and carrying her packed bags, lost, distraught, wanting to go home, not knowing who or where she was, and I had to reassure her, get her back into bed, bags unpacked, for she was going nowhere, she had no home except this dump. Then I discovered fat old Pammy stuck in her bed was bleeding from a pressure blister that should have been found two days previously, she'd not been repositioned enough and is thus suffering from pressure sores. Throughout the night I found this type of neglect was repeated with many residents, for when the nurse sleeps, suffering humanity goes without painkillers, wanders the freezing corridors lost or lie stiff in their soiled nappies crying out alone in the dark, scared of the flitting ghosts that swirl around the ancient witch's cottage that is Murderith House. All this goes on every night all over Sydney while the good citizens sleep, the oldies in the nursing homes are quickly bumped off.
The Matron doesn't seem to give too big a shit about the aging Aussie residents, for they're all expected to die sometime anyway, nobody will notices if they die a bit earlier, she just has her eye on milking the joint like a tired cash cow. When I got back to my apartment after a hard night's work I was uptight, going to sleep tense about conditions at the nursing home, sending the dead-fish-eye Matron a tight white hot beam of chaos/antipathy, even when I didn't mean to. And I held up a polished shield, as if facing the deadly gaze of the Medusa, any beams of stone-hard hate coming back to me would be deflected back again to her. And it seems my caustic vibes worked as the shit Private Agency she always hired has gone into receivership, owing $1 million in back taxes. It seems the money-grubbing uncaring Matron was a partner in the business, and will go down with it if she doesn't watch her arse. I realised that's why she often hired them, especially for the weekend shifts, as she got a cut of their expensive rates. If you worship gods like Mammom, when such false idols eventually crash, they can fall onto and crush their acolytes.
But this materialistic world is not just or fair, the dead-eyed slouch will be back at work tomorrow, she'd taken the week off to deal with her Agency crisis, and she'll notice I got hired without her say-so, and I'll never go to Murderith House again if she can help it, for she'll be trying to milk the place for as much cash as she can to pay off her debts, and will probably start a new Agency to achieve her greedy goal. Greed is the ruling ethos: businessmen, politicians, doctors, even priests, most lost souls suffer from it, it turns everyone green. And late at night, instead of treading the ice-cold corridors, I'll thresh about in my warm bed, aghast at the horrors of the 21st century and the industry of Dying, happy to take a rest, too bad about being broke and hopeless.
