My tray was late

I went down to lunch today and was sitting at my table right on time. Tray pass was a little bit slow probably because there is some new staff in the kitchen. I watched as meal trays moved a bit awkwardly from the kitchen to the aides who took them to the residents.

My aide took the time until my tray got there, to feed the resident next to me. I was watching the process and was just thinking they were getting trays out in a different way today. Sometimes they start on a different side of the dining room and pass trays from that side to the other – just for a change of pace.

But today, I noticed after fifteen minutes or so that the whole back dining room had been served except for me. I said something to my aide and she assured me they had not forgotten me. But it looked like none of the aides had looked back to the back dining room in quite a while.

Since there were student nurses, I asked if one of them could ask dietary about my tray. One of them did and she said that they would be sending my tray soon. But I waited for a little while, and that didn't happen. It was hard to sit there when all the residents at our table were served, except for me. I always have to wait to eat no matter what. I usually must wait until an aide is ready to start feeding me. In the meantime, my aide is in the process of finishing up feeding another resident.

The student nurses were standing around and I said I wanted my tray, and if I did not get it soon I would leave. I told them it's hard to sit there and smell food and have nothing to eat. With that, my aide asked one of the student nurses to watch things in the back dining room while she went to the kitchen. I saw her standing there waiting and I wondered what was up.

When she brought my tray, they had put cheese on my hamburger, which I normally don't get. They had no substitute for the potato salad except macaroni and cheese which I do not eat. They gave me a pickled egg instead of just giving me pickled beets. I hate it when they're wasteful. The bun on the hamburger was falling apart from moisture. I had to eat the hamburger on the bun upside down to keep it from falling apart.

The potato salad is not my cup of tea. So, this lunch was a hamburger, a pickled egg, and half the pickled beets. By the time I was finished. It was very hot in the dining room. I decided to leave before I ate my applesauce for dessert.

I talked with the nurse manager afterwards and asked if she knew that I was in the back dining room twenty minutes before I got my tray. She told me they could not find my dietary card. They needed to have it there just to know to make me a tray. So I was not even in the queue. Still, the cook has been here for several years and knows my diet and should have known what to put on my tray, or one of the aides could have told her.