Hell House

HELL HOUSE

by

Anthonystjoseph

     Well I was still working in nursing as a Certified Nursing Assistant and life was good.  I was working for a nursing agency which paid a lot better than the nursing homes that I had worked at in the past so life was getting real good.  As a nursing assistant I was a cut above the rest in the service that I offered.  I dressed very professionally, gave excellent care, was fun to have around, and didn’t beat my patients or leave them sitting in the results of their own bodily functions all day; so having me on staff was a plus.  I could tell you of some horrible things that happen in rest homes that would make you want to take your own life before you ended up in one. 

     I once had to hold a hot blooded female nursing assistant off of a poor defenseless woman.  I was not going to let this girl harm this woman by any means.  I have my ‘go-to-heaven’ card and nobody is going to get that canceled.  The hot blooded female nursing assistant and I were giving this resident a bath.  The female resident had to have a whirlpool because she had a colostomy bag, with part of her intestine hanging out of her abdomen, so the whirlpool helped clean the intestine which bled feces into the colostomy bag.  During the whirlpool you could watch the feces float around in the tub and be thoroughly disgusted if you concentrated on it.  The trick was to not concentrate on it and make sure the resident didn’t eat it.  It’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it.  The resident was a member of the theater community when she was younger and had actually founded a theater school so she would occasionally slip into extreme theatrics in her dementia.  She would at times divert and slip into one of her stage characters which would sometimes be funny and sometimes be sad.  

     One day the resident was in the whirlpool and the feces was busy floating around the water while the other assistant and I were cleaning the resident and the water at the same time.  All of a sudden the resident slips into one of her favorite characters, which clearly was a take on the wicked witch of the west, and let out an evil sounding horribly deep laugh.  She then looks at my hot blooded female assistant and proceeds to splash the water with floating-feces into the assistant’s face.  The girls face didn’t turn brown with feces because it turned red with anger.  She went to attack the resident as I grabbed both the assistant’s arms and had to hold her until she calmed down.  I was glad I was behind her holding her arms because if I wasn’t behind her she would have seen me trying not to laugh.  She calmed down as she scrubbed her face cursing up a storm as she washed out her mouth which was open during the ‘face splash’.  The resident had no idea of the danger she just faced because she had then slipped into her Glenda, the good witch character, and was in another world altogether just as quick as the splash occurred. 

     I have been in nursing homes where we had a strong suspicion that one of the night orderlies was sleeping with one of the younger bed ridden residents who wasn’t able to speak but we couldn’t prove it.  You should have seen all of us one morning with our stethoscopes to her abdomen because we just knew that her stomach bulge was an indication that she was pregnant.  It turned out that later in the day when she finally had a bowel movement that she was only constipated and severely impacted.  We still put all of our efforts into becoming detectives and catching the pervert in action so we could deal with him properly.

     Since I was a nursing assistant who was a cut above and in demand, my nursing agency only sent me to the best locations that would not encourage me to look for other employment.  I was hearing an awful lot about this one nursing home downtown that was like ‘hell on earth’.  My fellow agency workers would constantly tell me horror stories about the level of care and the extremely poor nature of the nursing home in general.  I was informed by some of my friends that this nursing home, which we will now call Hell House, was where the city of Denver, Colorado, sent all the homeless people when it was their time.  Now homeless people do not generally carry identification so they would have to look like they were older than sixty five in order to qualify because they didn’t usually know who they were when dementia and a hard life on the streets had set in… 

     The woman who owned my agency was as close to a friend as an employer can be so she never sent her star attendant to ‘Hell House’.  If you know me by now then you know I am an explorer and I was not going to pass up this visit to Hell on Earth.  I told my employer that I wanted to take a shift at ‘Hell House’ and I always got what I wanted from my friend slash employer.  She said, “Alright.”

     I drove my Mercury Zephyr downtown to Hell House and it was even dark than I imagined from its outer exterior.  It was an extremely bleak building that was on a hill all by itself and poorly lit; it looked like something out of a Stephen King novel.  The fact that it was poorly lit was a sign that the ‘light’ had forsaken the place.  I have always had a love of money and the security that it provided so the higher paying graveyard shift was generally my preference and believe me when I say, this was a ‘graveyard shift’.  I reported for duty and they told me I was working on the fourth floor.  I walked down the hallway past screaming residents tied to their wheelchair and stepped over soiled garments and licked my chops; the exploration was in full force.  I was definitely going to experience an adventure in this place.  I had no idea that it was going to be a life changing adventure.

     When I got to the fourth floor the elevator opened to a dismal environment that was poorly lit due to the fact that it was ten thirty at night and most of the lights were off because the residents were sleeping.  At least some of them were.  Normally you do a bed check with the shift being relieved so you can be assured that your patients are still alive and have been taken care of.  You do not want to take over a shift were everyone is in an old diaper that is packed with digested breakfast, lunch, and dinner if you know what I’m saying.  Well the evening shift had already decided as soon as we hit the floor they were leaving.  So the Nursing assistant I was relieving met me at the elevator and said, “See ya’ later.”

     I went to check on my residents and saw with my own eyes that I had not been lied to.  Some of these people had clearly lived a few decades on the streets and others were just too poor to afford any better care or facility.  One woman who I will never forget was in her bed with a four point restraint.  A four point restraint which is generally illegal in some states is where the doctor has given orders that both hands and feet be tied to the bed rails; hence the ‘four’ point restraint, two arms and two legs equals four.  This was a blessing to anyone caring for this woman because I still to this day do not know what her condition was but I will explain what I saw.  She had pus filled sacks all over her body the size of circular dimes with some of them leaking the yellow pus on her bed sheets.  Now I, who love the clear skin God gave me, looked at her, and then she did it.  SHE GROWLED!!!  WTF!  I am a fool.  They say curiosity killed the cat and even though I haven’t been killed at this point, I am well past my sixth life!

     This reminded me of one of my basic flaws…  I am too nosy.  Being nosy comes with being a true writer.  I tried to get closer to calm her down but she would not calm down for anything.  I didn’t have any holy water so I didn’t know what to do.  I was sure my priest was asleep and I didn’t even have his phone number since I stopped going to church when all I got as an altar boy was a football for Christmas.  Don’t get me started on that subject.  Not only did she growl but as I got closer she hissed and spit and tried to claw herself free in hopes of getting at me and my clear skin.  Now if that woman would have scratched me with those oozing pustules of pus I am sure I would have turned into a hot blooded female nursing assistant with no Anthonystjoseph to hold me back and I would be in prison right now for manslaughter.  I handed her a diaper and wished her and her demons well.  PHUCK YOU!  I was not prepared.  Three hail Mary’s, four Our Fathers, and a gallon of holy water and she’ll be alright.

     There was also the guy who they had taken off the streets who looked as insane as the day is long.  He could still walk and apparently suffered from a sleeping disorder because he just roamed the halls and would smile widely at you as you passed revealing three teeth and holding his naked penis in his hand while waving it at you.  This place was stacking up to be everything that I had heard of.  I was told later on that I was a self-actualizer and that I always had to experience things for myself.  This was proven at a young age when I was in the back of a Cadillac and I pushed the cigarette lighter in and then pulled it out when it clicked and saw that it was red.  I looked at the bright red coils of the lighter and wondered if it would burn my finger like it did the cigarettes the adults used.  Yep!  It burnt it alright.  Like I said; I am just too nosy.  I heard you say, ‘stupid’; that’s alright, just know that when I tell you something, I’m telling you the TRUTH because I checked it out.

      So two hours into my graveyard shift at Hell House, the head nurse and the other Certified Nursing Assistant and I were sitting at the nursing station when we start to hear these loud screams coming from a room down the hall.  We all get up to go see what is going on.  When we get to the room an old lady is actually hanging over the side rails of her bed being held up by her abdominal restraint.  She is just hanging on the side of the bed not touching the floor and flailing her arms and legs.  The abdominal restraint is like a jacket which they wrap around the patients abdomen and then tie to the bed in order to protect them from getting up and falling during the middle of the night.  I didn’t really focus on what she was saying because clearly she was just suffering from some form of dementia.  I simply walked up to her, lifted her back into her bed, and then proceeded to pat her on her chest and shoulder and tried to get her to calm down.  Her screams finally abated and then she calmed down and I walked out of the room since she wasn’t my patient and I felt like a total hero.  I had saved the day.  Mighty Mouse was in the house.  That only lasted for a second or two.

     As I got to the door something happened that I and my soul shall never forget.  All of a sudden something felt wrong.  Something felt very wrong.  Something felt very, very, very wrong.  I held up my hand and it was shaking uncontrollably.  Something was wrong.  Something was spiritually wrong.  Something was…  It felt like I was going through some sort of withdrawal or something.  I felt something really dark around me and almost in me and then I recalled what she was saying when we entered the room after hearing her screams.  She was screaming for us to help her and I then remembered her saying, “DON’T YOU SEE THEM!  THEY’RE ALL AROUND ME!”  Oh Lord, help me…  This was definitely worse than the cigarette lighter.  This was something that was trying to burn more than my finger.  This was something that was trying to burn my soul.

     I knew all of a sudden what had happened.  I had just come in contact with some dark spiritual entity.  It was as clear as my shaking hand.  I proceeded to walk to the break room knowing the psychic and spiritual abilities my mother claimed we had, and that I knew we had, had just been exposed to something sinister that did not like the light in yours truly.  I had in some way driven them away with some ability and they now knew me.  I think they always knew me but they didn’t know I could cleanse them from a person.  The journey that I was about to go on would change my life forever.  I was about to embark on an adventure that would be one of the adventures of my life.  I was about to meet some of the most profound people that one could ever imagine to meet.  I was going to meet those who would introduce me to Love.  I was going to meet those who would test my spiritual endurance and capabilities.  These would be the tests that could cost me my freedom and even my life.  If I failed or succeeded it would be worth it either way to find out if I was ‘one’.  Guess what?  I passed with “Flying colors”.

By

Anthonystjoseph

P.S.  If you only knew what I have to share with you…  This is only the beginning.  I love you!

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