Laura Carstensen

And so we had begun to talk a little bit and I complained to them about being bored.

And they said, we've got an assignment for you.

There are a lot of older women who come into the orthopedic ward, and we're going to put them in this room with you.

I was on a four-bed ward, and your job is to talk to them and keep them alert so they don't get confused and so on.

So we're giving you that job.

So two things happened.

One, I'm taking introductory psychology, and the second one is I've now been assigned to talk to older women.

Well, really, this was about helping me.

They were trying to give me a gift of a job.

So many things.

I learned so much from this experience about aging.

For one, their lives were so different from one another and their personalities and their outlooks on life were so different from one another that to the extent that I had stereotypes about what older people were like, they went quite far in challenging those stereotypes.

One woman that I shared a room with was a matriarch of her family, and these young kids would come in and sit on the bed and talk to her.

There were other women who were really...

sad, really in a tough situation.

I remember one woman in the hospital room who had to sell her home in order to pay the hospital bill before they would discharge her.

And so she had to be transferred to a nursing home instead of back to her own home.

And it was all for financial reasons.

There was another woman who just kind of laid in her bed and stared at the ceiling all day.

And, you know, the physicians would come in, they'd surround my bed, they'd be trying to do all sorts of things to help rehabilitate me, get me better, thinking about my future.