Right this minute, I’m sitting in the home of a family that I’ve been talking with for about a week. It’s 10:15pm on Thursday and we have just finished eating cherry pie a la mode and talking, relaxing after a lengthy admission into a hospice program. 6 feet away from us is a man lying in his bed looking out of the window which looks over his land. During the day he will see his beautiful pond and watch the ducks swim around in it. He has not been home in 3 months.
“…yeah, you’re pretty normal…” Whew. He’s so sweet; I think he really means it.
I spoke with my friend and colleague, Worth Kilcrease, last night and asked him if he thought I was grieving appropriately and what he thought of how the popular press and most pros in every helping profession have interpreted Kubler-Ross’ work. ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS wrote the book that described a model she created to share with the world her understanding of the phenomenon that happens when a person receives catastrophic news.
“On Death and Dying” has been misinterpreted ever since to be a book about the ‘stages of grief.’ The stages of grief have caused so much confusion and insecurity and shame from people who are grieving; people feel they aren’t grieving I went on a search to find out how many diseases there are under the sun these days. I decided to accept The Mayo Clinic site of links of diseases (in alphabetical order) that they treat. They say they are continually adding to the list and not all the diseases they treat are included. By the time I finished the ‘Gs,’ the count was about 420.
My uncle woke up first. I found out later it was 4:00am when I heard the shower running. My air mattress had long since deflated on the living room floor and I had moved to the couch which wasn’t quite long enough. One by one people woke up; I could hear the morning conversations about coffee and breakfast and people’s sleeping experiences. It
We had such hope.
We thought her liver transplant would happen “any day now.” This is a very personal story of why those of us who choose organ donation make our wishes known in writing; put the copy of this in the file with all our advance directives in a specially marked folder in the very front of our file cabinet in the very first drawer. However, even this is not enough. She died in the early hours of yesterday morning.
I was shocked but relieved. She made it through so many trips to ICU and long hospital stays. She had been living in the end stage of liver disease for over the last 2 years waiting for a liver transplant. This last year was rough. In my humble opinion they did well with most of her palliative care except for the nausea. I think they could have done better. |
AuthorIn fall 2014, I moved some old blog posts here that I had written years ago from 2007 to 2010. Hope they are helpful. Archives
February 2010
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