Worthless Goddamned Cripple

Freddie expected the CNA’s to unconditionally wait on him even after he’d shown the capability of performing a given task. For example, he easily navigated his wheelchair to the liquor store but took for granted that a CNA would happily drag his drunken ass to the shower room when the stench of his soap-deprived body became unbearable. If anyone questioned the annoying lack of effort he put into taking care of himself, he bellyached like a petulant child: “But I be all crippled up.” Sometimes he’d also remind them: “. . . And I’m a black man.” I never figured out any reasonable correlation between his race and his accidental injury. more »

CNA’s indifferently accepted that some residents pissed onto the linoleum floor while lying half asleep in their beds because they were too lazy to get up and baptize the porcelain catchall. It never crossed their pea-brains that such a resident might be wildly ill-bred. Most parents teach their small children appropriate toilet habits; therapists were supposed to teach such skills to absent-minded patients. But the therapists often sloughed the responsibility off on the charge nurse, who delegated it to the CNA’s. The dullwitted CNA’s proved themselves incapable of any action beyond summoning a member of the housekeeping staff and telling them to mop the floor.

To be fair, it was hard to tell at first glance who suffered from physical dysfunction and who chose to conduct themselves like a fucking animal. more »

Anger and indignation overwhelmed me when sycophantic nurses at the rehab hospital forbade me access to my file. Yet CNA’s not associated with me freely scrutinized the documents describing my case. They believed that my cognitive abilities were fried and openly gossiped about their findings in my presence.

CNA’s often went out of their way to snoop into a patient’s file. One afternoon two obese soap-dodging pork-monsters who reeked of cheap perfume waddled unannounced into my room. I’d never seen them before. One of them snatched the manila folder from my nightstand where a preoccupied doctor had left it, opened it and riffled through its contents. She moved her lips as she scanned each document for juicy information. One document captured her attention. Her eyes bulged while she turned to her colleague and like a grade-schooler noticing a classmate’s mischief intoned: “Awwwww, it say here he tried to kill hisself. That’s a sin against God.” She nodded her head to demonstrate her simple-minded pious authority. more »

Most residents excelled when glomming public aid checks¹ and securing government “benefits” i.e. handouts to which they were entitled (as opposed to petitioning for “assistance” which by definition requires effort). But when it came to bathing or digesting text full of big words and unaccompanied by colorful illustrations, they couldn’t understand why they should be bothered.

On three occasions the administration designated an HIV-positive resident as my roommate.² They realized I was probably the only denizen of the warehouse not so dirt stupid as to believe that you would “catch them AIDS” from doorknobs or airborne cooties. And I’m not some Neanderthal homophobe who assumes that all HIV-positive men are gay and therefore subhuman pariahs anyway. more »

The Torah teaches tolerance. It appeared that the old school Jews who owned the warehouse never got the memo. Or maybe they equated the tolerance of non-Jewish individuals with apathy because some out of touch old fart scholars decreed it so.

Whatever the case, Mr. Gold projected an irritating moral superiority that he claimed Judaism had bestowed upon him. It was obvious that the pint-sized administrator of the warehouse embraced the Jewish faith as a business strategy, only because the owners were devoutly Jewish. Mr. Gold often referred to Judaism as “weird,” and once remarked that he appreciated a faith that demanded frequent days off work to acknowledge holidays. more »

The warehouse administrator, Mr. Gold constantly proved himself an amoral subhuman. He had gained the physically and mentally infirm residents’ trust by tacitly claiming to have earned a degree that made him a medical doctor. In fact some community college had merely awarded him a certificate that qualified his sawed-off shyster ass to work as a garden-variety pharmacist. He might not have even done that—I don’t remember and anyway I knew him to be a pathological liar. more »

Read Part 1
“Caring staff” — One of my roommates, a friendly and gentle middle-aged man, suffered from Elephantitis. He harbored an uncommon variety of the disease that merited his lecturing at out-of-state medical schools. Classic Elephantitis causes extreme swelling of the victim’s limbs or genitals; my roommate’s manifestations weren’t readily visible. Though his body remained normally proportioned, his unique version of Elephantitis had rendered him legally blind and extraordinarily weak, and had usurped control of his bladder. Unsteady on his feet, he shuffled like the Mummy after downing a handful of Quaaludes. He spent his last days confined to a wheelchair. more »

In the weeks following my release from the warehouse, I discovered that various administrative secretaries had wildly fucked up the paperwork associated with my case. This came as no surprise given the treatment I received while a resident. Faced with the almost impossible task of lighting fires under unconcerned asses, I phoned the warehouse office several times and attempted to perform the administration’s job for them. Whenever a clueless staff member answered the phone and put me on hold, I heard a pre-recorded advertisement for the warehouse. more »

Ambulance service is like medical care insofar as you get what you pay for. A resident in a private nursing home that needs transportation via ambulance to a hospital can expect intelligent, polite, well-trained attendants. The same dumbasses who initially conjectured that recreational drugs and a botched suicide attempt caused my stroke abandoned me in a public warehouse. Like nearly everybody on a state-run medical facility staff, low-rent ambulance attendants delude themselves that they’re “health care professionals” though they’re amazingly stupid, lack even the most rudimentary social skills, and are less conscientious of their work than poorly trained chimpanzees. The ambulance attendants with whom I interacted presented themselves without exception as bumbling dolts. more »

I’ve previously written that a pain-in-the-ass is not worthy of respect only because they happen to live with a handicap. My one-time roommate Gerry proved himself a textbook example of my well-founded conviction.

Gerry bragged that he had once auditioned to fill the vacant position in the Doors left by Jim Morrison’s alleged death. Amazingly the three surviving members held the audition in the mid-eighties. Gerry claimed to have performed very well but “the bastards” rejected him “because [he’s] handicapped.” more »