EP39 - Ed

[00:00:01] Hi, everyone. This is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs. [00:00:08] Today, I'm going to be telling you the story of Ed. [00:00:12] He is one of the three people that influenced me so much from the Barron Center. The first one was Wanda. The second one is Ed. So I'll be telling you my story of Ed today. [00:00:30] I first met ed also in 1993, but he was actually the very first person that I met at the Behrend center, and that's because he was the hiring manager for the Behrend Center. So after I filled out my application, they contacted me and had me come in for an interview. And. And he is the person that I interviewed with. [00:00:59] It's so hard. Hard to just describe Ed, but I'm going to do my very best because to know Ed was to love him. And that's how I felt about him instantly. It was almost like I had known him my whole entire life. I just felt like I was sitting down with one of my best friends when I first met him, and that's how he made everybody feel. It wasn't like it was just him and I that had the special relationship. He had that relationship with everyone because that's how Ed was. [00:01:37] But anyhow, he was larger than life. He was tall, very tall, and he was large, very large. [00:01:48] And he was gregarious and flamboyant, and he would tell you would be in a conversation with him, and he would crack himself up. So he was laughing all the time. And you. It was just so infectious. It was someone that you wanted to be around. Because I know we hear a lot of words going around now, especially in this recent campaign, about being joyful. Well, when I think of Ed, that is one of the very first words I think of. He was just joyful. That is what he brought to the table. [00:02:34] He was infectious. [00:02:39] So I. I go into the interview. I'm kind of nervous. I don't know. First of all, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into going there as a registered nurse. And like I said in my story about Wanda, I had worked in a nursing home, but I was working as a nursing assistant, not as a registered nurse. So I didn't know what a registered nurse actually did in a nursing home. I remember them pushing the medication cart around the hallways, but I didn't know much else. [00:03:15] So I didn't know if I was going to be able to manage being able to give, you know, 50 residents their medications. That seemed a little bit overwhelming to me, but nonetheless, I sat down with him. And I talked to him about my experience and what I had been doing in my life and how I had been in the Navy and then I had worked at Cape Cod and how I had worked at Maine Med and then at the visiting nursing. Right. So he's looking at me. You could tell he was trying to size me up. Like when she's worked a lot of places in such a short term. And it is true. It is very true. [00:04:04] But I was continually smiling throughout that interview because he definitely brought out the best in me. [00:04:15] And by the end of the interview, he's like, you know what? I think we're going to hire you. I got to talk to everybody else and I'll get back to you, but I'm pretty sure we're going to hire you. So I was like, okay, that sounds great to me. And I went home and it was talking it over with Craig. We weren't married yet, but he was like, well, I think it's a great idea for you to work in the Barron Center. Any place where you can just drive straight to the building, park the car, go in, do your job for eight hours, and come home. Sounds like a great plan to me. So I was like, okay. [00:04:59] Well, it was true enough. And it didn't take long for them to get back to me. I think it was within 48 hours. He called me back and he says, we'd like to hire you as a night shift charge nurse. And I'm like, okay. I mean, when I first became a nurse, I understood that there were three shifts, 7 to 3, 3 to 11, and 11 to 7. [00:05:26] And it was an unwritten rule that when you started a new job, no matter where you were in nursing, you were not going to get on the day shift. You're new. [00:05:39] So it wasn't surprising to me that they offered me a job working the night shift. [00:05:46] Well, at that time, that Craig might have liked the idea that I was driving to a building and working, but he was not a fan of me working the night shift. I'm like, I got to get my foot in the door. [00:06:00] That was the other thing you understood as a nurse that you had to pay your dues in order to move up these shifts. It wasn't like you were moving up the ladder to, you know, a hierarchy. It was that you have to pay your dues in these off shifts in order to get to the privileged day shift. [00:06:25] So I said, I'm going to take the job because I think eventually I'm going to be able to get a day shift job and let me just start out on the night shift. It's not going to be as busy. So he's like, okay, I guess so. They had great benefits because they're owned by the city of Portland. So I started out on the night shift and I would float around to different floors as they needed me. But as a charge nurse, I would be doing the night shift medications for the residents that live there. A lot of times there weren't that many medications to do on the night shift. So it really wasn't like the worst job in the world. [00:07:12] It didn't take long for them to move me from the night shift onto the day shift. I didn't even Skip to the 3 to 11 shift. I just went straight to days. [00:07:24] And that was a little overwhelming. I'm not going to deny it. I think I did a cut. Yeah, I remember being on the second floor and you've got like, you know, 35, 40 residents and you're just rolling the cart down the, the hallways to each patient's rooms or residents, excuse me, it is where they live. It's not like being in a hospital and you to each room and sometimes they were semi private room. So there were two residents per room. And you're trying to get all their medications given to them. They're elderly and a lot of patients might have 10 to 12 medications at one time. [00:08:10] The good thing about it is a lot of the medications were given at the same time, like the 9:00 med pass, let's say then maybe you have a 12 o'clock med pass, but there's a lot less medication to give out then and then 3:00 or 4:00. So those, the hours that went on might be less medications. There were the popular times, like if the medication was given twice a day, day or three times a day. So then you would have like eight, two and eight. And so those might be heavier times to pass the medications. But the in between times were not always that bad. But that being said, it might take you an hour and a half to do the first med pass. Okay. It's a lot of work. And the patients or the residents, excuse me, I'm going to have to keep reminding myself, but the residents, not all of them are alert and oriented or ready to, to take their medications and they're slow. They don't want to be forced, they don't want somebody pushing pills down their throat. Come on. You have to be respectful of them and their, their own time frame. So it, it was a tedious job. But I did really like it, I have to admit, because you could engage with them and talk to them about things, and you were like a bright light to them because you're coming in from the outside. Or they have so much history in their lives that you can talk to them about and learn so many things. It was a joy, really, to work in a nursing home. I actually really, really enjoyed it so much. [00:10:04] But remember, I love history, so it's a perfect place for me. [00:10:10] So I remember being on the unit and Ed coming up with the director of nursing, Jeannie, and they were just checking in with me to see how I was doing, but they could see that I was enjoying myself. And I think that made them happy because they were so. The three of them. Ed, who was over the hiring and the education for the nursing assistants and nurses. [00:10:41] Jeannie was actually the director of nursing there, and Wanda was the assistant director of nursing there. The three of them, the three amigos, I would say amigos with an amigo, were so devoted to that nursing center. I mean, they absolutely loved the residents, and they wanted to make sure that the people that they hired and had put in place loved the residents as much as they did. You know, you don't see that loyalty or that passion for people working necessarily in that kind of community. It doesn't always come across. [00:11:34] But those three were outstanding, so they were happy. I could tell that they hired me because I was enjoying myself. Well, it wasn't much longer after that that Ed called me, and. And he says, we want to make you an rsd. I didn't even know what an RSD was. I had no. [00:11:58] No understanding. Hey, I'm just here to take care of the residents, okay? That was my job. [00:12:05] So they were all going to get together, and we were going to talk about it. RSD stands for Residential Service Director. [00:12:18] We had a standalone Alzheimer's unit on site of the Behrend center, but it was its own building, and they had set it up for 50 patients with Alzheimer's. [00:12:34] They had made it into separate neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods were named after the neighborhoods in the city of Portland. I thought that was so awesome. What a great idea. And in each neighborhood live 10 patients with Alzheimer's disease, and they were free to roam up around the building so they could go into anybody's neighborhood throughout the day. A lot of patients would stay in their own neighborhood, but other patients would roam around. [00:13:11] They wanted me to take over as the director of that building. [00:13:18] The woman who had started the building was kind of burned out, and they wanted to promote her up to an assistant director of nursing. And honestly, she deserved it because the fact that she got that building up and running and it was a complete success was amazing. [00:13:41] So I was going to be directly underneath her. She would be my boss, and then I would be over the charge nurses and the nursing assistants for all the residents living there. [00:13:58] I didn't know. I had no idea what if it was the right decision. I barely understood what resident service director meant. [00:14:08] I didn't even really think of myself in leadership. I'm telling you, I'm so dumb in so many ways, I had to look back on it to figure out that I was actually in management. [00:14:20] That's how little I really gave myself credit for that. So ridiculous when I think about it. But so that started a very strong relationship between Ed and myself. [00:14:39] I was a little bit overwhelmed. I loved the job. But of course, there's always, you know, there's always issues when you get promoted to something and you're fairly new, and there are charge nurses have been there that think they should be the ones that are getting promoted. You can understand that. I didn't understand it because I'm so naive to things like that. I'm just doing what they want me to do, really. That is how I function. And I think some of that is just from being in the military. If they tell you to go to the bathroom, you go to the bathroom. They tell you to make your bed, you make your bed. So I wasn't really thinking independently. I was just going along with what management thought would be a good fit for me. So I didn't really even think about anybody else. I was going to do what they wanted me to do. [00:15:36] So it. There were challenges, and I would find myself meandering back over to the big nursing home building and going straight in to talk to Ed. Thank God Ed was there for me. He was wonderful. That's all I can tell you about him. He was absolutely wonderful in every way. The thing about Ed is he was exactly who he was. [00:16:10] He never tried to put on airs. He never tried to pretend to be better than he was. He never tried to make you feel like he was better than you. He was just Ed. There's just no other way to describe it. He was flamboyantly flamboyant. [00:16:35] And he had a partner, Paul, who was a pharmacist. [00:16:39] And so we would spend a lot of time talking about their relationship. And Paul had a child from a previous marriage. So we would talk about the child who they both adored as on. And he just. I might go in there feeling so down. But by the time I left there, I was on top of the world. I don't even think I spent any time really complaining about my problems. I just went in there to talk to him. And there was something about him that just made you feel like you didn't have any care in the world. [00:17:21] He was so great. He was really just a fantastic person in every way. [00:17:29] In order to understand Ed, you need to understand where Ed came from. Ed was born and raised on Peaks island in Maine. [00:17:41] So he came from a fabulous family. I think there were five or six. Six, I'm thinking, though, five. Five children and his family and his two parents. [00:17:53] And Peaks island is kind of an unusual island. It's in the Casco Bay, just outside of the city of Portland. I think it's three miles from downtown Portland to Peaks Island. You cannot get to Peaks island by car. You have to take a ferry. And the Casco Bay line is the one that goes over there and drops people on and off. And it goes certain times. During the day, there's 858 residents that live there year round. In the summer, though, it goes up higher. It goes to between 2 and 4,000 residents in the summer, because a lot of people have summer homes over there. [00:18:41] They have an elementary school, a library, and a police station there. [00:18:46] And so all of the children that are born from families on Peaks island go to school there to start out with. And then they end up coming back over to Portland for middle school and high school. [00:19:01] I didn't know. I never even heard of Peaks Island. I would never even know there were islands off the coast of Portland. That's how uninvolved I was in Maine. I just didn't know anything. [00:19:16] So when after Craig and I had been married for a while and we had adopted our daughters, we decided to take the girls over there to check out Peaks Island. So we took the ferry when I think they were in the end of grade school, just starting middle school, and we took the ferry over there, and then we walked around the whole entire island. So as you can tell, it's not a very big island. [00:19:48] It took us, I think, two hours to walk around the island. They have a great restaurant there. [00:19:54] It is one of the most charming places. And after I went to the island, I understood why Ed was the way he was. Why wouldn't he be? He was born and raised there. They're so unpretentious. They're so unaffected by life because they're. They feel so Safe and secure on that little island. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody looks out for everybody. [00:20:25] They. The island itself has tried to secede from being part of Portland a couple of times, actually. It has a long standing history, but the latest. The last time was in 2011, and it's when their property taxes went up, like, 200%. Well, first of all, why? [00:20:47] I mean, come on. Because they're part of the city of Portland. So when Portland's taxes went up, their taxes go up, but they don't take into consideration that it's an island and there's only a small population there. So when things like that happen, the community rallies together and they go up and they try to secede from Portland, but they always end up working it out. [00:21:15] And I could just see where Ed's big personality came from. It came from being an island resident. It came from everybody knowing everybody on that island. [00:21:30] It came from people always having your back. [00:21:34] You always felt like Ed was on your side. Even if there was a bubble over his head that said, she's crazy, okay. You always felt like he was on your side. [00:21:48] I didn't stay in the Alzheimer's building. I think I was there a little over a year, and then they moved me back over to the big house, and I was the resident service director on the skilled unit. And I was so happy about it because my unit was at one end and Ed's office was at the other end. [00:22:11] I would finish up my shift, and without fail, I would walk down to Ed's office and we would recap what our day was like or what was going on in my life. What was going on in his life. [00:22:30] He was so wonderful. I felt like he was a brother to me, really. When I look back, I think about him as a brother to me. He always had my back. I mean, just a wonderful, wonderful person to have in your corner. [00:22:47] But I'm going to tell you two stories today about him that kind of. [00:22:54] I don't know if it says something about me or if it says something more about him, but we would talk about. One of the things we would talk about were some of the doctors. So, you know, it's not like you're in the hospital and the doctor comes there every day. A lot of times the doctors would show up maybe about once a month, sometimes more than that, but usually it was once, once a month, and it was just to sign the orders that you had called and gotten, like changes in medications or requisitions for lab work or whatever. So they would come in and they would Sign all the charts and review the orders that you had gotten from them. And then they would actually round on their patients when they were there. So when I was with Ed, he would tell me about the doctors because he had been working there for so long, so he knew those doctors, right? [00:23:50] And we had one doctor that we. He would always roll his eyes at. He always thought that they were over. He was over medicating the patients to keep them more sedate. And we don't like that in a nursing home. I mean, we should be able to manage their personalities. We don't want them to be zombies. We want them to feel still living a fulfilled life. And that's the one thing about Jeannie, Wanda and Ed, that was their philosoph and we stuck to it. So there was this one particular physician, like I was telling you, that Ed had disdain for. [00:24:31] So if Ed had disdain for him, I was going to have disdain for him because I was loyal to Ed and I was loyal to the residents. Well, one of the patients or residents had gotten really wound up. [00:24:47] So I was calling to see if maybe I could get a sedative or something to calm her down. [00:24:53] And he got on the phone and he said, well, give her 5 milligrams of Haldol. And Haldol's an antipsychotic. [00:25:03] And I was so taken aback at him for even suggesting that. And I'm sure I had Ed's voice playing in my mind. And I said out loud, what, are you crazy? And he stopped talking. He's like, well, what would you suggest? [00:25:27] I don't know what I said. I think I said something to the effect of. I think a little bit of low dose Ativan would be fine. I don't think we need to go guns ablazing. He says, fine, go ahead. Couple give her 1mg and Atavan every 8 hours and let's see how it goes. [00:25:47] So I'm like, thank you. So at the end of the day, sure enough, I meander down the hall to go see Ed and I tell him the whole story and I. He burst out laughing. He was laughing so hard, everybody heard him. That's how loud he was laughing. When I said, I said, what are you crazy? He said, you said that to him? I said, yes, I did. Why would he even think that is the right thing to do? [00:26:20] He never let me forget that story. He never let me forget it. He. After I moved back to Michigan, he even posted on my Facebook that he had been with a group of friends and one of the Very first stories they were all commiserating about was me saying to that doctor, what are you crazy? They loved it. [00:26:44] To me, of course, totally unaffected and not even understanding what I did. I never really even would have understood if he hadn't laughed so hard that I had gone up against a physician that maybe not many other nurses would have. But the patient did respond to the Ativan and it was the right call, so no regrets there. [00:27:10] The second thing about Ed that I always remember, I had gotten a bunch of slate tiles from my mother in law from an old roof in Vermont that they had taken the tiles off and then actually put shingles on. And it was during a time where a lot of people were doing those slate plaques for your front door that would say welcome. So for Christmas for Ed, I made one for him and it said Ed's office on it. And I had a heart on it in a little home. [00:27:49] And every time I talked to him, it didn't matter because he didn't stay at the Barron center. He moved around to other nursing homes. Ultimately, he ended up at the Barron center again, and that was the last place he worked, which was so in keeping with him. [00:28:10] But he would tell me, I've taken that slate everywhere I've gone, and it's the very first thing that I hang up in my office. [00:28:21] And that meant so much to me. [00:28:24] That bond between us was never going to be broken. [00:28:30] Unfortunately, Ed died when he was 70 years old. It just doesn't seem right to me. [00:28:39] But of course he was surrounded by all the people who loved him so much. I was back in Michigan because believe me, I would have been right at that bedside too. But one of the other things that he used to tell me, he goes, now, Don, when I die, I want it to be a big deal. And I go, what do you mean by that? He said, I want people jumping off the Empire State Building, putting their hand on their forehead, saying, oh God, he's dead. What will we do without him? I want it to be a big deal. [00:29:16] So when he died, he was surrounded by everybody that loved him. [00:29:23] But it's my complete honor to do this podcast about him because he was a spectacular human being. And I hope this podcast travels around the world in tribute to you, Ed, because you were the bomb. [00:29:47] Thank you for listening to my podcast today. [00:29:54] If you have a story that you would like me to share, or if you have would like to even talk on my podcast, that would be great. [00:30:04] You can go to my website, milkmon.com M I L K M o-n.com all one word. There's a section at the bottom that you can write comments in, or you can directly email me through that link, or you can call me directly. If you want, you can use my other email address, declan1att.net or you can call me at 616-843-1392. I would love to hear from any one of you, and I'm more than happy to put your story out. [00:30:46] We're still working on getting everything aligned through our our attorney, so this podcast will be going out in my series once I get everything lined up here. Hopefully it's going to be within the next two weeks, and from that day on, all the podcasts will go out every Saturday. It'll just be a routine until the next time.