For Northwest Home Care Aides engaged in the hard work of caring for Consumers, moments and months and years can have a way of blending into one another. But sometimes, individual days stand out as the worst days on the job.

Home Care Aide Glenda Faatoafe is on the phone at a hospital. It’s a routine day, a typically dreary November morning in the Pacific Northwest. She’s waiting for one of her Consumers to get out of surgery. Faatoafe apologizes for the sporadic interruptions during the interview. She seems to live her life somewhere in the complicated intersections between intimacy, professionalism, empathy, and perspective.

“Everybody gets tired and has bad days,” Faatoafe says. “Sometimes the client may even be tired of you! You just can’t take everything that happens personally.”

Faatoafe got her start as an HCA nearly 20 years ago on something of a lark. A former neighbor of hers was a nurse who would come over to work in Faatoafe’s day care. One day – a day Faatoafe says she’ll never forget – the nurse seemed particularly stressed. “She told me she had been really worn down by her situation at home. Her husband had Alzheimer’s, and she was really stressed by the toll of taking care of him, and worried about who else would take care of him.”

Without thinking twice, Faatoafe volunteered her services – and a career that’s lasted 17 years was hatched in a moment. Faatoafe has an easygoing nature, apparent from the way that lessons and stories gleaned from experience flow from her effortlessly. She credits one good man with grounding her during her decades of service: her husband, whose natural optimism and kindness Faatoafe attributes to his Samoan ancestry. His support was never more needed than on the toughest day of her career.

“The first day, she told me she was going to die,” Faatoafe says. “The first day. Straight up.”

Faatoafe recalls a conversation she had with a 77-year-old Consumer in the first 10 minutes of meeting her. “She told me she was being kicked off hospice care and was going to start taking her right-to-die medicine,” Faatoafe says.

Faatoafe describes how she used her infectious optimism to lift up her Consumer’s outlook and assess all the options available to her. That first day was the hardest, but with the help of a seemingly innate sense of humor and deep-seated optimism, she made it through.

For Glenda Faatoafe, being a great Home Care Aide means juggling
for all of the things that come at her Consumers, like Medicaid, doctor
visits, transit, diets, and exercise.

“I cried all the way from Olympia that day,” Faatoafe says. “But then I realized she has it harder than me: three hip replacement surgeries in one year, coming back from polio, and being confined to bed for a year.”

For Faatoafe, the first step was getting her Consumer to take her first steps in over a year. After the first day, the days go by.

The daily reality for HCAs like Faatoafe is a complex juggle of their Consumer’s needs. Faatoafe says HCAs are balancing “everything from Medicaid, dealing with transit, doctors, diets, and exercise schedules. It’s your job to take the burden off the client.” Faatoafe believes that HCAs who take this approach make the day-to-day lives of their Consumers “100 percent better.”

Faatoafe has worked with three hospice care patients who requested the prescription to end their lives. Only Washington, Montana, Vermont, New Mexico, and Oregon have Death With Dignity Laws. The lethal medication is prescribed by a doctor to terminally ill adults who have less than six months to live.

“Many people don’t have anyone to miss them by the time they’re ready to die. Or their relatives have all left,” Faatoafe says.

She’d like to see a “caregivers’ Bill of Rights” that would allow HCAs to have time to mourn the death of a loved one or a consumer.

Faatoafe is in her mini-van now. The sounds of I-5 traffic whizzing by provides a sense of the mundane that complements her matter-of-fact delivery. If a Consumer snaps at her, she doesn’t take it personally; if a representative votes against the interest of HCAs, they can always be voted out next election; if it’s hard to get out of bed to face the day, imagine what it would be like to be physically confined to bed.

Faatoafe has learned the art of putting herself and others at ease about things that could otherwise be embarrassing, a tactic that she says she learned from her husband. Everything from dirty diapers, to treating bedsores, to medicine is a subject of humor for her.

She simply doesn’t seem to have the capacity for negativity or pessimism. Faatoafe is off to start her day, which she says is shaping up to be a good one.

Photo by Paul Joseph Brown.