This comes from a thread on Reddit and it was such great reading that I had to write about it.
— One patient I worked with lived in an abusive home (she refused to leave due to cognitive impairments and there wasn’t anything we could do to make her leave). She dealt with many health issues over the few years I worked with her, and eventually was diagnosed with a terminal disease. She passed away 3 months later, but before she passed she said to me, “Some people never get a happy ending I guess.”
This really stuck with me because you always hear that “it gets better” or “it will all be ok in the end,” but for some people, it just…. doesn’t.
— I once took care of an elderly lady in a nursing home. Completely alert and oriented, but physically couldn’t walk or transfer herself to the bed or toilet. We had to pick her up and pull her pants down to use the toilet. She was sitting in the toilet one day, while we waited for to be done and she said “Its bad when you’re a little girl and you never think anything like this could happen to you”, then she paused for a second and said “No, that was the good part. This is the bad part”. I’ll never forget it.