I just love my grandmother. She’s pretty awesome. No, sir, she does not let her oxygen tank get in the way of her casino days.

The country is getting older. People are living longer, and those Bob-Dylan-listening-peace-loving hippies are all going to be hitting the Medicare age in the next few years, if they haven’t already.

In my experience, there are two types of geriatric patients. Some are kind of helpless, reliant on family and friends, needy and anxious about everything. The other type is the tough-as-nails-I-survived-the-Depression-dammit patient, who is strong, stubborn and has a hard time realizing she needs help.

I have had some personal experience with both of these types of patients.

My mother’s mother was the first type. God love her, she was a hypochondriac who was always afraid of something, so much so that she rarely went to bed before 5 a.m. because she couldn’t sleep. Momsey (that’s what we called her) was the daughter of a physician, the only one of four children who married and had a family. She was the baby of the family, and, from her own description, kind of spoiled. I mean, the woman went to private school during the Depression.

According to her, she was a bad and willful child. “I don’t know how they let me get away with all the things I did,” she would say. Her escapades included making fun of nuns, setting her house on fire then proceeding to have it covered up by the maids, swallowing a rosary (not sure about that one), and breaking her arm trying to catch passing trees while riding a street car.

I loved her dearly, but she was highly dependent on others – to a fault. She never worked a day in her life, she never drove a car, and my grandfather did everything for her. Partly because of that, my mother encouraged me to be a strong, independent woman and “do something so you don’t have to depend on your husband.”

I see patients like this all the time. They want to tell you their entire life story even though the ED is crashing all around you. You feel bad and want to spend that kind of time with them, but you also secretly wish you’d get an overhead page from a nurse to get you out of the room. They may not have much medically wrong with them, but they show up at your ED often, mostly lonely and wanting someone to talk to.