Working as a male home health nurse, I thought I'd seen it all. At age 33, I was 5 years into my career.
Never say you've seen it all. Life will throw you a curve ball you've never seen.
My boss calls me into the office. "Tom, we have a new assignment for you. An elderly woman has requested a 24-hour-a-day nurse. We'd like to assign you."
"24 hours a day? So... I would live in her house until...?"
"Until she dies or she cancels the request."
"No wonder you want to assign me. I live alone and I'm a workaholic, so I already only see my apartment when I sleep in it."
"You got it. So, will you accept the assignment?"
"Yes."
I packed up my essentials, let my apartment complex know what was happening (they were quite happy to continue to receive my rent, even though I would not be physically present until the end of the assignment), arranged for all my bills to be on auto-pay (my checks were already on direct deposit), and headed over.
An old lady opened the door in response to me ringing the bell.
"Good morning, ma'am. You requested a 24-hour live-in home health nurse?"
I showed her my ID.
"I did. Come on in. I'll call you Tom, and you can call me Meg."
"Meg?"
"My birth name is Margaret, but that's way too formal. Call me Meg. I want us to be good friends."
She closed and locked the front door behind us.
"I've got years' worth of food that can't go bad. I don't think I'll live that many more years. So we'll never need to leave."
"How old are you, Meg?"
"I just turned eighty-one."
"Doesn't anyone come visit you?"
"Nope. My husband died years ago and my son was killed by a tropical disease back in '93. He was volunteering as a doctor in Nepal."
"I'm sorry, Meg. He was your only child?"
"Yes."
"So... what exactly is my job here?"
"Aside from the usual keep an eye on me to make sure I'm OK, because at my age no one is ever 100% healthy, you mean? Here's the details of the contract."
I read through it.
"So... anything you ask?"
"It won't be anything onerous. But you're young and tall and strong, and I'm old and short and frail. I don't need to be climbing on step-stools to get down my ladles and pans or to change a light bulb when you can reach them just by standing up."
Meg was a good foot shorter than me. I'm six-foot-one, and she was MAYBE five feet tall. If that. She was slightly plump (at her age, I wouldn't expect otherwise: only young people have washboard-flat stomachs), her hair was pure white and shoulder-length, and her cheery smile seemed permanently attached to her face.
"That doesn't seem unreasonable."
"You can put your stuff in the second bedroom. It has an attached washroom."
I took half an hour to unpack and put away what I'd brought. Then I returned to the living room.
"It's lunchtime." The clock did read 12:30 p.m. "So your first task is to go into the kitchen with me." I did. "Now get down that pot, that spoon and that container of pasta."
Meg's cooking was wonderful. I complimented her.
"I learned a lot from my mom," she explained.
I hadn't been paying full attention to Meg's outfit, but now that my mind could relax a bit rather than lock in my concentration on essentials, I noticed she appeared to be wearing a robe.
"Only because I didn't want to answer the door naked. This place has a comfortable temperature, so unless other people are here, there's no reason to wear clothes at all," Meg explained.
After lunch, she asked to see my ID again, then opened a locked safe, took out some papers and seemed to write something. She put the papers away in the safe and returned my ID.
"Do not open the safe until after I die," she instructed me.
"All right."
I wondered about that, but she was the client. Her wishes were to be respected.
"Since you're here, and I don't have any immediate medical issues, why don't you sit down on the couch and relax a bit?"