I can’t cook.
I mean, I really can’t
cook.
Once, when covering 3rd
shift at a personal care home, I decided to do a favor for the 1st
shift person following me and prepare the residents’ lunch: I made what became known (for all the wrong reasons) as “Kirsten's famous meatloaf
and macaroni and cheese.” I printed out
recipes and put on an apron and everything.
The next day, when I called over at lunch time so the residents could
heap their praise and thanks upon me, I was surprised to learn they were
waiting for a pizza delivery (residents asked me, quite seriously, if I put
cheese in mac & cheese and if I cooked the macaroni while another resident joked
that my meatloaf could be used to patch potholes (a joke that he dusted off 2-3
times a week for years).
When we would have birthday/holiday
celebrations at my office, my potluck lunch assignment was invariably to bring
paper plates. And napkins. Not that I’m complaining – bringing paper
plates is much easier than trying to cook something and, to be fair, I think my
coworkers were trying to protect themselves against being poisoned. Not that they thought I would poison them on
purpose, of course. But my cooking
skills are lacking to the point that they weren’t willing to risk an
inadvertent poisoning.
Which is better than the current situation with Gary. He believes I am intentionally poisoning him. He always did the cooking in our household so it’s been a quite a change for both of us to rely on me to feed us but he mostly eats spaghetti or frozen pizza and even I can’t mess that up too badly. Or so you would think. Every once in a while, he's complained that the food wasn’t appetizing because his “taster is off” but lately he’s grown suspicious that the food tastes “off” because I’m poisoning him. This bothers me more than I would have thought (since I’m putting substantial effort into both preparing his meals and not poisoning him). I’ll also point out that I’m more bothered by the fact that he thinks the food is inedible than I am by the fact that he thinks I’m a crazed psychopath trying to murder him but that’s a different issue.
But this got me thinking back
to the aforementioned personal care home.
We had a resident, I’ll call him Ben, who suffered from severe
paranoia. There was usually a week or
two each month when he became convinced that the staff was trying to poison his
food or his medications. And, for
reasons that were clear to none of us, Gary was the only person Ben trusted and
that meant that during Ben’s periods of paranoia Gary had to give Ben his meals. The only way to ensure Ben would eat was for
Gary to go there and personally serve Ben his breakfast, lunch and dinner. And the only way to ensure Ben would take his
medication was for Gary to go there and administer them (morning and evening
meds weren’t too bad as Gary would already be there to serve Ben’s meals but he also
had to go back for 11:00 PM meds). So,
he went. Multiple times a day. Every
day for a week or two at a time. Every
month. For years. I’m not sure exactly how many years – 5 or 6
maybe – but it was a long time. And Gary
never complained about having to do it.
Not once. (At least not to me).
And now as I’m sitting here being
accused of poisoning him again, I’m wondering what to do. I can say “I’m not poisoning you” but let’s
be honest, that sounds like something I would say if I was poisoning him
so that’s not really helpful. The only
thing I’ve seen work in a similar situation is to find the one person on earth
that can be trusted to not poison. Gary
was that person for Ben; who is going to be that person for Gary?
Clearly not me. I wish I could find that person. If I do, I’ll bring the paper plates. And napkins.
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