Personal Narrative: My Experience At The Rehab Center

My experience at the nursing was definitely a different one. When I first arrived there I was extremely nervous. I had never been to a nursing home or rehabilitation center before and didn't really know what to expect but that there would be older people just sitting around not doing much. But to my surprise not everyone there was old and the older people that were there didn't only just sit around all day. After getting over the initial fear of the Rehab center, I was ready to meet my client. My time there with Mr. Calhoun was a special time although we didn’t set any goals or accomplish anything new. Most of our visits consisted of talking in his room and occasionally we would sit out in the living area with the other clients. I would always ask him how his day went when I first arrived and if any of his children had visited him this week. Most of the time his responses were pretty short and I thought it was because of the Alzheimer’s but eventually I noticed it was because he wasn’t comfortable seeing me yet. Eventually he got comfortable seeing me and in fact looked forward to my visits from what I could tell. He didn’t have any friends there he would always tell me when I asked and that his only visitors would be his daughters and me. I asked Mr. Calhoun for the first couple of weeks if there was anything
that he would like to do together during our visits and his response was no. One day I brought him a crossword puzzle book and asked him about it during our next visit but he happened to have lost it. During the couple of weeks that I was there I realized that he didn’t want to set a goal to accomplish because he was miserable there and in fact his goal was to find a way out of the Rehab Center. Going to visit Mr. Calhoun at the nursing home I realized that listening is definitely a big part of being a good social worker because people are usually more open to talking to a good listener. Most of the time he didn’t care if we didn’t have anything to do but he was just happy that he had someone there to listen to his every problem and vent. Visiting Mr. Calhoun I realized that working with older adults in Rehab and nursing home may be something that I would maybe like to do sometime down the line the in my career. Overall I can definitely say that visiting Mr.
Calhoun was a good learning experience and also helped me become a better listener. Mr. Calhoun was a low talker and since he had Alzheimer’s it was hard to understand him sometimes because he would usually doze off mid-sentence or mumble his responses. Most of questions that I would ask were close-ended questions because open-ended questions seemed to be harder for him to answer. In going to the Rehab center and visiting my client I have been able to practice things that I have learned so far in my classes as a social work student and I believe that this experience is one that will help me in the
future.