There was one lady I felt the most sorry for. She was Russian, but had previously lived in Poland. She was once one of the victims of the concentration camps during Hitlers reign. She was only a small child at the time, and she was in one of the camps with her young mother. Most of the time she would cooperate fine with us, but occasionally she'd slip back to that time frame, when she was young, and living in the camps. When this happened, she would call for her mother in Russian; we could tell when she was having one of these episodes, as she would no longer answer in English. During these episodes, she tries to escape her wheelchair, she refuses food, she throws things to the ground, yells at the top of her lungs for hours on end, and has been known to spit at people.
All I knew was that I couldn't work in that kind of environment for too long, as I would empathise way too much with them all, and it was so depressing to me; the other staff members never understood why it effected me so much, and I didn't understand why they seemed unfazed.