My father’s occupational disease

 My father was a reporter at a local newspaper company. When he was around forty years old he became hearing-impaired. Then he quit his job as a reporter and became a proofreader for the company, because being hearing handicap does not affect proofreading.

 Actually I heard he was an excellent proofreader. His co-worker described my father as “A proofreader who has the power of ten men”.

 But his occupational disease made our nursing care for him very difficult. He found it difficult to hear. So when I needed to discuss something with him I had to communicate with him in writing. He was a professional proofreader. When I made grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes, he scolded me very severely. Every time I showed my writing to my father, I felt very nervous, as if it was a test.

 My father needed to go to hospital three times a week because he needed kidney dialysis when he was sixty two years old. He had continued dialysis for sixteen years.

 One day a young nurse who worked at the hospital called me. She needed to talk with me about my father. She said:

“Your father doesn’t follow my advice. Recently he even refused to read a memo I wrote.”

She let me read the memo my father refused to read. I understood why my father had refused to read it.

 We should not blame her. Nurses require various abilities. They do not work at a newspaper company. Writing is not their most important skill. If there were a nurse who was good at writing but bad at giving injections, I would stay away from the nurse. If there were a nurse who never made a spelling mistake but always made mistakes with medication, I would run away from the hospital.

 My father was a proofreader. Maybe he had tried to educate the nurse to write a good memo. Tough love was the main educational way of his generation.

I asked my father:

“Young people these days are not familiar with tough love. Could you go a little easy on them?”

After that my father became more corporative to the nurse.

 In the future, the same things will happen to us when we are in hospital or a facility for the elderly.

I am a kind of actor. If young actors came to entertain us in my facility, I would get angry and would say:

“I can’t watch your terrible acting!”

If a cook were in a nursing home, he or she would get angry and would say:

“I can’t eat this terrible meal!”

If a carpenter were in an elderly welfare facility he or she would get angry and would say:

“I can’t live in this terrible housing!”

 All of us have careers. All of us will have occupational diseases when we get old. They could make nursing care for us difficult.

Picture　by　patrykkosmider