Retirement Home Night Nurses

        Some people don’t give up wild nightlives laced with drugs, memory loss and old friends.  

Mick Forquer, stays out all night at the same joint every Friday, Primrose Retirement Community. Forquer is a tool and dye maker turned night nurse.

        In 1993, Forquer was put on the overnight shift at a Mercruiser factory. There was no medical care available during his shift, so his safety manager offered to pay Forquer’s way through emergency medical technician classes. Nine years later, with three sons younger than 6, Forquer enrolled in nursing school. For 19 months, he was a full-time student and full-time Mercruiser employee.

        Three weeks after he got his nursing license, Forquer switched to the day shift at Mercruiser and started working nights at Grace Living Center, where he met the orneriest patient he has cared for. She was in a wheelchair and couldn’t speak, but she always smiled and winked at Forquer. One occasion caused him to immortalize her memory.

        “I’m showing off,” Forquer said. “I’m spinning this tray around. I’m setting it down and I’m picking people’s meals off and I pick it back up. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you today? No, OK great.’ Go get the next tray. As I’m walking by her, I made the mistake of not knowing exactly where she was. I bend down. I start taking drinks off the tray. She reaches in between my legs and pinches me. Tray, drinks and food go up in the air and I scream, ‘Ah hoo.’ Off I go.”

        Forquer ran off red faced, and the rest of the staff jeered at him mercilessly for weeks. Some nurses, such as Travis Driskel, insist earlier shifts build better relationships with patients, but memorable events like that cause Forquer to disagree. When that patient died, he told that memory to her family. The story let them briefly forget their grief and celebrate their loved one’s mischievous personality she upheld to the end. 

When he can help ease the grief familie’s experience, Forquer says he knows what he is doing makes a difference. He says he never questions whenever his work has meaning. He knows he impacts peoples’ lives for the better.

Other long-term care nurses, such as Linda Johnson, agree their work improves lives. Johnson, a night-shift nurse at Westhaven Nursing Home, also depends on a similar sense of purpose to handle late hours.  

        “It’s kinda like an intrinsic award, internal award,” Johnson said. “I don’t know. I’m just one of those people I believe who was born to serve. I don’t get any more money for it. I don’t get any pats on the back.”

        By 11:01 p.m., Johnson should celebrate the end of an eight-hour shift and drive home to her three cats and dog. Instead, for two-hours of overtime she will tiptoe up and down two hallways in Westhaven Nursing Home to combat her exhaustion. She paces as if she is walking through a minefield. The slightest sound could awaken one of her restless patients, who will be grumpy, irritated or in pain.

        Johnson never anticipated working as a long-term care nurse. When she was 23, she joined the Navy, where she quickly discovered she detested being told what to do.

        “I was airheaded,” Johnson said. “I didn’t understand anything about rules and regulations. I was like, ‘You want me to do what?’ I was like, ‘I wanna take a nap.’”

        She squirmed her way out and returned home to Minneapolis, just to have her parents ship her off to live with her grandmother in Muskogee.

        After raising four strong-willed daughters to be self-sufficient, Johnson’s grandmother was determined to ensure Johnson had the education to support herself. Her grandmother saw her goal fulfilled in 1996 when Johnson, who refused to take orders from superiors in the armed forces, bowed to her grandmother’s aspiration and graduated as a registered nurse from Oklahoma City University.

        Johnson lingered between various medical jobs until she found she enjoyed the challenging, fast-paced nursing demanded in skill side or recovery therapy geriatric medicine.

“It’s kinda like being a detective,” Johnson said. “I gotta figure out what’s going on with my patients. They change rapidly. One minute they can have, be OK. The next minute they could have, I don’t know, an ulcer on their penis just like that other night.”

        Johnson says she considers permanent residency at Westheaven as a life sentence in one’s final days, so she dutifully keeps her chronic patients patched up, but she is more meticulous with her skill patients.

        Other long-term care nurses, like Heather Judein, prefer the long-term care aspect of nursing home care.

Each week, Judein endures 50 hours with only four hours of sleep. She forces herself out of bed at 6 a.m. every Thursday. At 8 p.m. the next day, she will rest for four hours before returning to work for a 32-hour weekend shift at Brookdale Assisted Living.

        Judein would switch to the day shift in a heartbeat if it weren’t for one thing; she doesn’t have anyone else who can get her 6-year-old daughter up for school.

        “When you have kids, you make sacrifices, and my kids come first above all,” Judein said.

        Judein is two years shy of a high school diploma. She swapped school clothes for scrubs after she had her first baby at 15. Judein picked up a night shift at a nursing home in Waynoka, Kansas, where she watched DVD training videos until the small, rural nursing home counted her as good as a registered nurse.

        Twenty years and three kids later, Judein’s second daughter, Anastasia, works with her mother at Brookdale as a certified nursing assistant. As she does with all her new nurses, Judein has tried to prepare Anastasia for losses she will inevitably face working in long-term care.

        Time has normalized death for Judein. In lieu of family, she holds patients’ hand until they take their last breath. The details of when she first sat with a dying patient have faded, but she adamantly remembers her fear in those final hours. She does her best to help younger nurses grieve after the unavoidable experience.

Judein habitually scrutinizes each of her co-workers as they move through their shifts. Nursing home negligence killed her grandmother, so she is vigilant to protect her patients.

        Any suspicion of mistreatment launches Judein into reconnaissance missions. In one instance, she sneaked Brookdale’s health and wellness director, Crystal Butler, into a resident’s room. Butler hid in closets and showers overnight twice to catch an abuser in the act.

        “It’s hard to stay put in the closet,” Butler said. “When I want to go spider monkey and choke her.”

Butler started her medical career in pediatrics. Two weeks of screaming toddlers convinced her elderly care was her true calling.

        Butler’s office is lined with photos of the patients she has cared for. When she glances at the pictures, her eyes moisten. Long-term care is a double-edged sword for Butler. She treasures her time with her patients but suffers crushing heartbreak when that time ends.

        After 15 years of long-term care, Butler couldn’t withstand another loss. She resigned from long-term care, but she thinks about the countless mornings she sang to residents to wake them up for breakfast.

        “The best part about it was being the person to wake everybody up in the morning for breakfast,” Butler said. “That was my favorite part. It kinda sets the whole day. In a lot of ways, it really determines if they’re gonna have a good day or bad day.”

        She can recite many of her residents’ life stories by heart, but each time a patient repeats tales of his or her younger years, she leans in and listens with childlike eagerness. Sometimes she hears new twists in the memories she has listened to countless times.

        Butler recalls one story that started when she and a resident walked down the sidewalk together. When the resident retells that walk, he transforms it into an adventure and daring escape. As he tells it, he jumped into a moving truck until he ended up in a room at Cushing hospital. He had to jump from a fourth-story window to escape and return home.

        Butler’s eyes light up and her laughter is contagious as she talks about how that memory has changed. Such exaggerated adventures replenish her motivation to continue working late into the night.

        “One of the hardest things is knowing, I mean I know when to go home, but just making myself do that,” Butler said. “I mean, if I didn’t have a daughter, I could probably just live here and do what I do for free if I didn’t have to eat or feed her.”

        Forquer also understands what it’s like to struggle to return home some nights.  He has adopted a strategy of when the scrubs come on, he pushes everything else out of his mind. As soon as he clocks in, he talks to the day nurse about which patients he needs to pay special attention to during his shift. Throughout the night, he says to himself, “This is what we choose to do, we help people.”