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Last Writes

Hilton Koppe April 17, 2015 9 Comments

Hilton Koppe

Jeez mate, you are really dead. “Really fucking dead,” as you would say. I don’t need to be a doctor to know that. The cop who rang me was right. You must have been sitting in your lounge chair, dead, for at least twelve hours, maybe more. Looks like you were enjoying a quiet drink when you checked out.

I’ve got to tell you mate, it’s pretty weird sitting here at your dining table, with you there, slumped over all mottled and cold, while I’m trying to fill out your death certificate. With your advance-care directive staring at me from on top of all your papers on the table. Was it left there as a gift for me? I did feel

Aperture

Martin Kohn April 3, 2015 8 Comments

Martin Kohn

(for Helen)

This openness into
This brightness onto
This bodied and
dis-embodied
sunken-eyed
knowing

This close
and blinking
moment
This shutter stop
goodbye

Your round soft
shoulder pillowed
beneath a feeble
hug
The Lord
“not quite ready”
to take you
even though you
and Trixie your cat
had walked the dark path
to him again

Surprise Ending

Ellen Kolton March 27, 2015 9 Comments

Ellen Kolton

“He’s just expired,” said the nurse as I approached Ray’s room in the large inner-city hospital where I work as a patient advocate. “And his wife has just arrived. Why don’t you go in?”

I found Natalie bent over Ray’s body. His hollow cheek was drenched with her tears.

“I’m so sor–“

“I told him yesterday to talk to Jesus,” Natalie interrupted, speaking quickly. “I told him if the two of them decided it was time for him to go, then it was okay with me. I guess they had their talk,” she said, glancing at Ray as though expecting an answer.

My Father’s Girl

Maureen Hirthler March 20, 2015 23 Comments

I’m walking very slowly with my dad down the produce aisle at the local supermarket, past the colorful waxed apples, Mexican mangoes and Rainier cherries, and imagining my life’s blood trickling onto the floor from an invisible wound.

As I pass by the misting system spraying the bins of green, red, yellow and orange peppers, past the lady reaching for carrots, past the stock guy balancing the heirloom tomatoes into a precarious stack, I want to scream. The sense of loss is overpowering.

Go Ask Alice

Ellen Rand February 27, 2015 10 Comments

Ellen Rand

In 2010, I became a hospice volunteer.

My mother had died of a brain tumor five years earlier at age eighty-seven. I saw being a hospice volunteer as a way to express my gratitude for my mother’s compassionate hospice care and to help other caregivers to weather a loved one’s passing. And, as a former reporter and writer, I thought I could help people to write their life stories, if they were interested.

In short, I wanted to act on E.M. Forster’s words, which for me sum up the goal of hospice: “Only connect.”

I soon realized, though, that by the time most people come to hospice, they’re too ill and/or too demented to carry on a conventional conversation,

Thirty Below

Kristie Johnson February 13, 2015 18 Comments

Kristie Johnson

One cold February morning during my third year of medical school, I walked through the entrance of the rural hospital where I was doing a nine-month rotation, and made my way to the nurses’ station. Feeling the warmth return to my face, I set down my coat and bag and hung my stethoscope around my neck.

The charge nurse, Barb, waved me to her computer.

“Kristie, you have a patient.”

She shuffled through papers, grabbed a blank chart and placed the patient’s admission note on top. When she saw the name, her face fell.

“Ah, it’s Peggy.”

Casting Out Demons

Jef Gamblée December 26, 2014 14 Comments

Jef Gamblee

As I stand beside the bed in Mr. Jerome’s living room, his pit bull puppy sniffs the body bag lying on a stretcher nearby. His cat curls up on the bedside shelf.

“That dog gonna be a problem?” asks Jude, one of the crematory guys.

“She might get underfoot,” says the neighbor, whose name I can’t remember. “But she’s a lover, not a fighter.”

Jude and Chuck are here to pick up Mr. Jerome, who died of prostate cancer today. His body lies on the bed–the wasted husk of a once lively, athletic man who had taught history in a New Jersey middle school.

I’m a hospice chaplain; Mr. Jerome was my client. I’d known him for about six

The Case of the Lima Bean

Matthew Webb November 21, 2014 7 Comments

Matthew Webb

“Matthew, go see this lady about her breast mass,” says my attending physician at the clinic where, as a third-year medical student, I’m doing a family-medicine rotation.

Okay, I think. I’ve done my ob/gyn rotation; breast masses are no big deal.

I don my short white coat, freshly baked from sitting in the back of my car as I drove to work on this oppressively hot morning. As I sling the stethoscope around my neck, I feel my inner voice (my constant companion amid the stresses of medical school) gearing up, ready to offer insights, questions, distractions….

Busting Grandma Out

S.E. Street September 19, 2014 3 Comments

S.E. Street

I had been in London on business all of seven hours when my son, Tom, called me at two in the morning from our hometown, Sydney, Australia.

“Grandma’s had a fall. She’s been taken to the hospital, but she’s all right.”

My mother’s having a fall was nothing unusual; she had always been an unpredictable fainter. My husband and children and I called it her party trick, making light of it to soothe her embarrassment.

She had no recollection of these episodes; one minute she’d be seated at the table, and the next, she’d be lying on her back on the floor, her feet propped up on a chair, with the family smiling down at her as if she were Sleeping Beauty awakening

A Doctor’s Dilemma

Jessica Zitter September 12, 2014 12 Comments

Jessica Zitter

It was my first day at my new job, practicing a new specialty. Having spent fourteen years as an ICU physician–including a four-year pulmonary/critical-care fellowship in this very hospital–I had just completed a palliative-care fellowship. Now I was the hospital’s palliative-care consult attending.

When I set eyes on the patient in room 1407, my first thought was: THIS LADY NEEDS TO BE INTUBATED–STAT!

The only trouble was that my job was to ease this patient’s passing, not to prolong her life.

The team had told me that Mrs. Zelnick, an eighty-two-year-old widow, was dying from pneumonia and didn’t want to be put on life support.

Last Rites

Candice Carnes July 11, 2014 11 Comments

Candice Carnes

In 2002, I was living in Albuquerque and working as a nursing assistant. My staffing agency had assigned me to a medical surgical floor at a hospital in Santa Fe, a fifty-minute drive away.

One day, as I was enjoying the high-desert beauty en route to the hospital, a code was called.

The patient’s name was Sam, as I recall. It could have been anything, but Sam is the name that echoes in my memories of that day.

His heart stopped.

I hadn’t arrived at the hospital yet, but I had been involved in enough codes to know what had been done.

Despite his advanced age, Sam had full-code status with no restrictions, meaning that he or his family had wanted everything

The Pros and Cons of Living with a Terminal Illness

Ellen Diamond May 9, 2014 8 Comments

Ellen Diamond

Before I retired in 2000, I worked in a state agency as a peer counselor, or more formally, an employee assistance program (EAP) coordinator. The “coordinator” part was there because my job description wasn’t actually to do counseling; it was to assess the problem and refer the client for help.

But of course both of those processes involved counseling. We just couldn’t call it that.

In 1986, shortly after I’d begun the job, I was separately visited by two employees with HIV/AIDS. Treatments such as the antiviral drugs used so successfully today were nearly a decade away, and a diagnosis of HIV meant almost certain death. These clients were understandably upset and frightened, but they each made it clear to me that they

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: end of life

Last Writes

Aperture

Surprise Ending

My Father’s Girl

Go Ask Alice

Thirty Below

Casting Out Demons

The Case of the Lima Bean

Busting Grandma Out

A Doctor’s Dilemma

Last Rites

The Pros and Cons of Living with a Terminal Illness

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: end of life

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