Hospice and whimsical

We had our weekly team meeting yesterday. Yes, the day after Christmas, we had to meet and present on every one of our patients. It was a long day. In order to have said team meeting, Medicare mandates that a doctor, nurse, social worker, and chaplain must all be present. If any of the core group is missing, you cannot meet and officially collaborate on each patient. Anyways, our team chaplain was out of town last week. So we had a PRN chaplain fill in and sit through our meeting. He was very nice and polite. He gave a devotion, prayer, and then some comments as we discussed each case.

Then...about an hour into the dullness, he starts laughing. Not just a giggle, but an out and out roar. We were all slightly confused as nothing terribly funny had just been spoken. Finally, through his tear filled laughter he said, "do you all realize you are sitting on millions?" "These stories, these people, you could make millions on a book from the few stories I've heard today."

Laughter slowly spread across the room. I get used to a certain level of crazy in this job. I go into people's homes and spend time in their story at a very critical juncture. And people, are always people, dying or not.

We laughed as we realized how these stories might sound to a new person listening. He had not heard about the rooster chasing me across the yard, in the middle of the city. He didn't know the man had a security camera on his back yard connected to his large screen television so he watched me run from this rooster.

The chaplain wasn't aware that we had a patient whose son gave him a gun and told him to kill himself. He hadn't heard the story of another patient whose family members drive by their loved ones home for eight months and never stopped. Suddenly when they are dying, they are at the bedside wondering what went wrong.

This chaplain didn't know about my veteran who won't let me take a pen into his home for fear of me writing any information about him. Or my 100 year old who is sharper then me. I told our patient we were giving her daughter some medicine to help her sleep, the patient told me, it would be neat for me to give her daughter a pill that would make the patient sleep.

Then, oh, then, we have the people who I need to inform they are dying. Or the ones who yell about everything. Or the rich who think they can "buy" good care for us. (I assure you we give good care to them all). Or the homeless woman we have in a shelter right now. Or...my list goes on.

Just my caseload of thirty or forty a week. My team serves eighty to ninety. This hospice on any given day has over 900 patients.

I had this idea that working here would be a time of reflection. A time where dying people impart wisdom and I get the benefit of listening. As a friend said recently, I thought it would be whimsical. A good word I thought. And as I looked up the definition I found it to be an accurate description after all.

Hospice = whimsical: Full of, or characterized by, whims; actuated by a whim; having peculiar notions; strange; freakish.

So to the outsider looking in they say, "oh I don't know how you can do that job, doesn't it get to you."

Yes, my friends, it does, but not because of the dying people. It's those whimsical living ones who are hard to handle.