where's the food?

I showed up today (a Wednesday) at around 5:15pm, and brought my brother a mango smoothie.  I figured I was too tired to take him out (it was after work) and that it was hot out if we sat outside, and I knew he really liked smoothies.  I also knew I might be interrupting his dinner, and that he has a tendency to not finish; as soon as I get there he gets up immediately to go somewhere else.  He is very private and doesn't like to share conversation about himself with others.

There was a new seating arrangement at his dinner table.  Two tables of four had been pulled together, and it looked like a nice community of residents.  But much to my surprise, I saw his plate was empty and clean, and so were several others.  As usual, he immediately got up.

So I asked him what was going on, and one of the other residents, a woman, who seemed pretty articulate compared to the other residents, told me that they were serving chicken that night and had run out of the meat.

There is an ongoing issue that because my brother's table is farthest away from the serving area, that this table always gets served last, and my brother has raised this many times at "care" meetings, meetings the nursing home is required to hold with residents and their families to discuss care issues.

He was really angry.  Apparently he had even gone down to the other floor to see if there was any extra chicken, but there wasn't.  I told him he had to eat something or that I was just going to leave.  This tactic didn't work.  So I walked over the the servers and asked what had happened.  They said they had run out of the entree and offered sandwich food, but the my brother had refused.

I asked them for a turkey sandwich and the vegetables which frankly, looked pretty sick, and they saran wrapped the food on a plate and we took it outside (my brother carried on about the vegetables so I just returned them).  Once outside he calmed down a bit,  But he said something I really took to heart.  He said that he thought it would be great to have a recording device to record what the staff said and did, that that would get them in trouble.  I thought about it and mentioned what would be really good was if residents could take videos like you see of police brutality (but I don't want to imply that's happening at this nursing home, it's just that if you knew you were being filmed, you would probably be extra careful in the way you related to the residents.)  It was sad to me that my brother, because of his disabilities, wouldn't be able to operate either a recording device or a smart phone/camera.  I thought his remark was pretty insightful.  He range of intelligence versus his intelligence disabilities always catches me in surprise, even thought I have known him for more than 60 years.

He also mentioned that he wished I had taken him out for dinner tonight.  I don't usually do that during the week unless my husband goes with me because it's some effort, both physically and emotionally.  I did feel pretty guilty once he said it.