Hospice Patient Storytime
Filed under: Heebie Jeebies - June 12, 2008 @ 6:00 amI’m a hospice volunteer, and one of my patients is an 80-yr-old woman who weighs 72 pounds and doesn’t like swear words (man o man if she knew about this blog !!) I visit with Clara (not her real name) weekly and read out loud to her since she is legally blind.
The other day I paid her a visit. The moment I saw her I could tell something was terribly wrong.
“What’s the matter, Clara?” I asked.
“Blondie is dying,” she said mournfully. Blondie (not her real name) was her guinea pig, and suddenly, also on hospice.
I checked on poor declining Blondie, and we talked about death and dying for a bit, and then I asked, “Would you like me to read to you? Take your mind off things a bit?”
She thought that was a good idea, and handed me a new collection of short stories. It was by Bentley Little. I thought they were going to be mystery stories, since that is the genre we had read before. Oh, but no. It was horror. Really fucked up horror.
The first story I read was about a family plagued by zombies and the only way to revoke the curse was for the sister to go deep into the woods and fuck her zombie brother and have his evil spawn baby so they could throw it on the ground and smash its head open. The next story I read was about a mother who crucified her 7-yr-old daughter and drank her blood. The last story I read was about this maniac father who was so obsessed with recycling that he made his children drink their own urine and fucked his daughter so his sperm wouldn’t go to waste.
Holy shit, I was so embarrassed to be reading this trash out loud to this frail little old lady with a dying guinea pig. Seriously, I was squirming in my seat, it was mortifying. It felt like a bad dream. I felt like I was reading her my blog. It certainly did take her mind off the present situation.
An hour after I left, Blondie died.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:50 am
Now that’s some REALLY SCREWED UP HORROR! And you read that to a hospice patient? Now, that’s something you don’t see every day!
How did you even read it all out to her!
If it was me I would like have stopped halfway and read another book.
Oh well, these are the kinds of things that make life memorable, I guess! (:
June 12th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Who the hell gave her that book?
June 12th, 2008 at 7:38 am
How did she respond to the stories? What did she say?
Nice new format btw?
June 12th, 2008 at 7:44 am
*cough* Yeah, that’s creepy. I think I’m going to Borders for lunch today. Oh no…just to sit at the cafe and use their wi-fi…that’s right…
June 12th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Capn: Whenever I got to a particularly heinous line, like, “I felt sick, Daddy was going to do it again - bend me over the couch and deposit his seed in me,” I would force myself to read that out loud and then look at her and laugh nervously. She made shocked faces and little guinea pig noises, and I would ask, “Do you want me to keep reading?” And she would say yes, but I really don’t think she was grooving on it. At the end I said, “Boy he sure has some weird ideas!” and she agreed with me. I dunno, maybe she DID like it. The stories kindof shocked and turned me on, but freaking out little old ladies is NOT on my fetish checklist. Yikes.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:28 am
I gotta find this book.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:02 am
well, she is on hospice. Maybe she thought she’d try something new…. I got my grandpa to try sushi on his death bed. It does sound like an interesting book though.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:03 am
BTW…. it sucks that her guinea pig died. That’s gotta be hard….
June 12th, 2008 at 10:57 am
all these feelings we feel in life, ARE life….
she wants to feel SOMETHING, and since she won’t be getting any hard cocks up in her, i’m sure death and rape will do…..
sounds like a great set of stories…….
we will miss you “blondie”, now you are in guinea heaven…..
hopefully god isn’t stuffing you into his anus for pleasure….
June 12th, 2008 at 11:38 am
ROFL, TheLion. You always know just the right thing to say in these situations… but aren’t guineas a little big to stuff up one’s ass?
June 12th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Wow! Ummm… And I thought there awkward moments in MY life. Definitely not a story for the kiddo.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I had a guinea pig all through High School (he died the summer after I graduated). It was very traumatic when he went. Not quite as traumatic as reading those stories to a little old lady. Clive Barker’s short fiction is worse, though.
Lion isn’t far off, actually. God shoves bad guinea pigs up the asses of veterinarians who enjoyed inflicting emotional wounds on children, in life. It’s in ‘The Divine Comedy’, kind of a side note on the second circle of the inferno.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Aren’t guinea pigs killed all the time as lab fodder?
June 12th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Can God make a guinea pig so big that he can’t shove it up his ass?
The mind boggles.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I think I need to add that book to my “To Read” list.
And they eat guinea pigs in Peru…quite tasty actually.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
My mother has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home.
Once I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She said, “A big cock!” Uh… OK.
“Do you want a small, medium, large, or extra large?”
“Oh, large is big enough.” Uh… ok.
“Black or white?”
“White, of course!” (She is a bit conservative, you know.)
So I went to the adult store and bought her a battery-operated dildo.
She seemed quite pleased with it. I doubt she used it, but she was just happy knowing it was there. She was very sad when dad died in 1994 - in part because she always REALLY liked sex. I think she liked just knowing it was there - like she was STILL a woman regardless of age or disability.
When she moved to a new nursing home it disappeared. Go figure.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
i assume god’s anus is a bit bigger than the rest of ours because he seems to have been able to shit out a lot of crap onto us.
DOR-yes, mice and guinea pigs are the biggest lab death animals.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Guinea Pigs are about as sentient as a dish towel.
What a fucked up story. Contrary to popular belief, people on the brink of death don’t mind thinking about it or talking about it, in general. It’s all of the younger people that are scared shitless of dying.
Still, that’s a weird scene. You might as well have been reading her shit from Penthouse Letters.
I’m trying to think about my personal equivalent to this. Maybe reading to my mom aloud from Leviticus?
-C
June 13th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I guess you could be right, TheLion… if I believed in God’s absolute exsistence.
Regardless the thought of a guinea pig anywhere my ass is enough to make my pucker factor kick into HIGH gear.