This week a letter to the editor appeared in the Davis Enterprise from a family thanking the hospice team who had helped them care for a terminally ill family member.
They were most grateful for the opportunity and support to provide care at home “in a loving environment knowing there is the amazing support network we can fall back on for all we need. He died at home, with all of us who loved him so much, right next to him.”
Reading the article brought back my memories of having the privilege--and I do mean privilege--of training and working with the first hospice team in Davis.
Two local women had read about the work being done for terminal patients and their families by Hospice of Marin. It was the first hospice in the area and they offered training in hospice care. The women took the training and returned to town and put an article in the local paper about the beginning of a hospice program in Davis and offered training to local folks interested in getting involved. One of my nursing colleges and I saw the article and we both hastened to sign up. It was 1979. I had cared for and buried both of my parents and one grandmother in the three previous years.
I had been in nursing for 15 years and I was well aware that mainstream health care did little for patients and families who were facing death. The basic goals of health care focus on preventative health and curing patients who suffer illness or injury. Death
is not an acceptable health care outcome. Neither health professionals nor humans in general find death easily acceptable. Hospice was formed to help fill this void in health care. It focused on helping terminally ill patients and their families face the end of life challenges with loving care, respect and comfort.
I had read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ books on death and dying while caring for my own terminally ill family members. Kubler-Ross and Hospice made a great team. The timing was perfect for me to become a very eager Hospice team member. Life events have a way of leading us to unfamiliar places that suddenly are exactly where we want and need to be.
On our first night of hospice training twenty of us sat in a circle around our two teachers. We were told we would be doing a slightly modified version of an exercise they had done in Marin. We were each given twenty-five strips of paper and asked to write one item on each strip of paper consisting of the twenty-five most important Ps in our lives: the five most important People, five Places, five Priority activities of daily life, five Pleasures and five Possessions. Once we had finished writing on the twenty-five slips of paper, we were asked to arrange them in order of their priority to us--from most important to least important. We were then asked to sit back in our chairs, relax and listen to a story.
The story began, “You haven’t been feeling well lately and so you have made an appointment with your family doctor. Your doctor seems concerned about your symptoms and says he needs to order some x-rays and lab work.” At this point the story stopped and they asked us to pick three of the paper strips we were holding, wad them up and toss them to the floor. When we had begun the exercise, we had no idea why we were writing the papers; but now we where getting a hint of where this exercise was going. The original priority of our papers seemed to instantly change. The story went on: “After getting the first set of test results back, the doctor has ordered a biopsy.”
It was getting more apparent all the time where the story was leading us. After reading each section of the story leading to our diagnosis of terminal illness, we were instructed to toss away three more slips of paper. At the end of the story we were allowed to keep three slips of paper. When our instructors had been given the same training exercise, they had to toss all twenty-five pieces of paper away. They had found it so overwhelming they decided to allow us to each keep three papers representing our most important treasures--the things we felt we needed most in our last hours of life. Our empathy for the terminally ill was dramatically heightened that night. Empathy is defined as the ability not just to feel for oneself, but also to feel with and for others.
We all learned very quickly that, when working with terminally ill patients, we would be learning from them how to live our lives to the fullest each day. The families of hospice patients often express their thanks to their hospice care givers; the care givers, in turn, always express thanks for having the
To Be Continued
*[Editorial note: Unfortunately, no continuation of this work was located among Nola’s files.]
No comments:
Post a Comment