Hospice Care

Last night I attended a funeral of a very dear woman who died after a long battle with cancer. She was Grant's granddad's wife (second wife, first one also died a few years ago). About a year ago, my most endeared aunt Katherine also died after a battle with cancer, as did her sister about a year before her. Most of them were blessed with hospice care at the end of their illness...when no other treatment remained. The poem on the inside of the card from the funeral last night (Janice Carrick) spoke to this so beautifully:

God Saw you getting tired,
When a cure was not to be

So He closed his arms around you

And whispered, Come to me

You didn't deserve

What you went through

And so He gave you rest.

God's garden must be beautiful,

As He only takes the best.

And when I saw you sleeping

So peaceful and free from pain,

I would not wish you back

To suffer that again.

Okay, now I am sure many of you are wondering why I am posting such a sad post. I know it sounds kind of corny, but in some weird way I am feeling pulled to hospice nursing. My family thinks I am crazy. They think that since I cry at every funeral I attend, how could I deal with death and dying as a job. But I don't really see it that way. I see it as a way to end people's suffering, to make them comfortable in a very painful time, and to let them end their life with grace and dignity. I don't know, maybe my family is right, but it is still festering in my mind.

I went onto our local chaplaincy's website and they actually are looking for a perdiem RN to work every other weekend....a perfect schedule for me. I think I will call them today and inquire. Maybe I can start by being a volunteer and see if I do have the capacity to deal with it. I mean, I am trained as a NICU nurse and deal with the everyday life and death situations of newborns. You can't get much more stressful than that. In a perfect world I would work as a hospice nurse half time and a labor nurse the other half. So my world could be filled with the coming and going of life, and I could aid in the miracle of both.

I will leave you with some photos of my nursing graduation. I have been thinking a lot about the part of me as a nurse, and am aching to get it back into use again. I am so proud to call myself a nurse, and am truly blessed by all the wonderful nurses who trained me to become the nurse I am today.