Topic: SNOW

SNOW

There was a time when the promise of snow meant delightful anticipation.  My brothers and I would listen to WSAI for the school closings.  St Margaret Mary, our grade school, closed if the North College Hill city schools decided to shut down for the day.  I loved it when we knew the night before that the next day was a snow day.  We’d stay up late, drink root beer and eat popcorn, and watch Welcome Back, Kotter.  The next day we’d wake up without an alarm and go sled riding and build snowmen, and come home to hot cocoa with little marshmallows.  It was glorious.

When I started working in nursing homes back in the early nineties, all of those feelings surrounding snow changed.  It first hit me that there were no snow days in the nursing home when I was an LPN working nights in an Alzheimer’s unit.  The snow started about three a.m., and I couldn’t drive home at 7am, my quitting time, because the roads were impassable.  And it was a moot point anyhow, because my relief couldn’t get there.  I did the morning med pass, and then they let me sleep for a couple hours in an empty resident room before the noon meds were due.  I did my treatments and then slept some more.  Half of the 3-11 shift couldn’t make it in so I ended up working a full 24 hours-with breaks where I could grab them.  I was supposed to work the next night but by then the roads had finally cleared and they let me go home and covered my 11p-7am shift. 

When I got into management, reports of upcoming snow filled me with dread.  The weight of responsibility I felt as a nursing home administrator and as a director of nursing surpassed anything I had felt up till then and anything I have felt since leaving the provider side of long- term care.  It was my legal responsibility to make sure these residents were taken care of.  I had 100 or so lives in my hands.  We had to get really creative to make sure the facility stayed running during a snow storm.  There were plenty of days when I as the director of nursing was passing meds and the administrator was doing laundry or passing trays.  Lots of times we had staff who were willing to work but they couldn’t get out of their driveways or they relied on public transportation, which often wasn’t running in a blizzard. We’d usually have some of the maintenance guys who loved driving in snow running all over town in their trucks picking up nurses and nursing assistants and bringing them to work. 

I remember playing “Let’s Make a Deal” every time it snowed.  I’ll give you next weekend off and a $50 gas card if you stay over and cover 11p-7a.  We let staff stay overnight in empty rooms sometimes if we knew a bad storm was coming.  We’d feed them out of the kitchen and give them the best bonuses our regional directors would let us give.  Somehow, we got it done.  Everybody got fed, and medicated and bathed and dressed-nothing fancy.  We weren’t giving back rubs and manicures, but we all survived. 

Now I work as a surveyor of nursing homes, and if it snows too bad, I can use some of my personal time and stay home, warm and dry.  I don’t have to come in no matter what like I did back then.  I know nursing homes aren’t the only business that never has a snow day, but it’s what I know.  It’s what I lived with for about 25 winters or so.  I still have a visceral response, that tight feeling in my stomach, when I hear there’s going to be a bad snow storm.  And then I remind myself that I don’t have to worry about it like I used to.  But I haven’t forgotten and probably never will forget the awesome responsibility it is to be a nursing home administrator or DON. I have nothing but respect for all of those nursing home workers who don’t ever get a snow day.