Some reasons I enjoy my job, November issue

Some reasons I love my job . . . on certain days


Home health is like stepping into a different dimension. Sometimes it’s awkward, sometimes intimidating, sometimes even boring, but that doesn’t happen much. I would like to share a few stories of the last week or two that show why I enjoy my job.


I believe you cannot be truly and consistently happy without serving other people, without other people being a part of your concern, and it has to be relatively often. My job affords me the opportunity to feel that I am of some service, never mind how meaningful, or meaningless as the case often is. It still affords me very frequent occasion to touch and be touched by someone else’s life, even briefly and lightly.

I treat a woman who is wacko. That’s not her diagnosis but it’s still the case. Anyway she is very kind and enjoys our visits very much. By which I mean she enjoys talking to someone who doesn’t walk away. I take her trash out each time I see her because she is a huge fall risk and her kids are nowhere to be found, for this she thanks me profusely. Once her sink was leaking and I was able to fix it and she thought I was a magician. Again, not meaningful in the grand scheme of things but it affords me many opportunities to increase my happiness for which I am grateful. Once her front door was locked and I could hear her inside saying she had fallen, after calling the police and breaking a window we found her naked on the kitchen floor where she had spent the last 12-24 hours but that’s a story for another day.

This week I had a great conversation with a man in his late 80’s who showed me pictures of the 16 German prisoners of war that he “guarded” in WWII and eventually became friends with. He was clearly proud that he was kind to these men giving them ice cream and getting to know them personally. He told me that the war eventually meant nothing to them and their personal relationship. He then showed me a postcard written to him after the war by his closest fellow American soldier during the service who was a wealthy Jewish man from New Jersey. This postcard said that he and his wife had met up with one of the German prisoners of war (he listed him by first name only) in Germany and were having a great time at the Brussels world fair. Think about that for a moment.  A Jewish man and a German man who had only recently been on opposite sides of a world war, completelt over it because of a relationship. Stories like this are one reason I love my job.  In the not too distant future there will be no opportunity to talk with men and women who lived through WWII and I am glad i get the chance, even when they sometimes drag on a bit.