J.W. Manus tells me this book is wonderful and I need to actually promote it.
Yikes!
One Foot In Heaven, Journey of a Hospice Nurse, is FREE!
Check it out here.
An excerpt from the Introduction:
To me it seems obvious that the body is a shell, a wonderful machine built to house the soul. There’s a Star Trek episode entitled Spock’s Brain, in which aliens remove Mr. Spock’s brain and use it to power their environmental systems. Thanks to Dr. McCoy, Spock’s body lives on as a soulless automaton until his brain is reattached. That’s the body. However, another Star Trek episode may be even more descriptive of death. Its title is, That Which Survives. In this episode, Ensign Wyatt, one of the Enterprise’s typical expendable crewmen, dies in the transporter room because the holographic projection of a woman touches him. After examining the body, Dr. McCoy says, “It’s as if every cell in his body’s been disrupted, Jim.” That’s death. The soul inhabits every single cell and death disrupts every one of them.
In my capacity as a hospice nurse, I see dead people every working day. Well, sometimes they’re not all the way dead, at times they’re almost dead or they’re on the road to being dead fairly soon but who isn’t? Birth and death are two sides of the same coin and they’re two of the most intimate actions a human being can witness. The only other act that compares in terms of intimacy is making love. Obviously I don’t make love to my patients but it is a service of love that a hospice nurse renders. Patients and families I’ve just met become my closest friends in a matter of minutes. They give me an all-access pass into their homes and their lives. They entrust me with the management of their death or the death of their loved one. It’s an enormous responsibility and one I do not take lightly.
Under no circumstances can this be considered a “how to die” book, nor is it an instruction manual designed to teach the layperson how to care for a dying patient. It’s a collection of true deaths that have touched my heart and my soul, and changed me. Dealing with patients and their families, or caregivers, as they go through the dying process can be rewarding, touching, tragic, frustrating, frightening, disgusting, enlightening, spiritual, chaotic, hysterically funny and all of the above at once. My work as a hospice nurse is never dull.
I’ve cared for incredibly wealthy patients living in isolated compounds with their own staff of private-duty nurses, and desperate, homeless people who travel along the road of death in the backseat of an old van parked at a strip mall. The end is the same. Movie stars and politicians have mothers, fathers, grandparents and aunts and uncles who use hospice services. Drug dealers have brothers who get cancer or suffer strokes. Criminals have mothers too and sometimes they die on hospice. I’ve cared for the family members of CIA agents, police officers and district attorneys and at the same time I’ve been the nurse assigned to patients dying in homes that have been converted into meth labs and grow-houses. Like I said, my job is never boring.
My role is to midwife every patient into the next world with as much grace and dignity as possible. I guess the most astonishing thing is I’m good at it. I no longer see my patients as a set of systems or think of them as a series of tasks to complete. They are real to me. I laugh with them, I cry with them. Their stories are written on my heart. I remember their names.
