Re: Can you be a hospice nurse without being religious?
Thank you both, for your compliments. I realize that I am "intrusive" here, not being a hospice nurse, at least, not up to making that move, yet.
Carolebellelady, before i was an OR nurse, I was a critical care nurse, a CCU nurse, to be specific. My patients taught me so much about death and dying. I learned when a patient told me that he or she was going to die, that it was going to happen. Period. And that no matter what the diagnosis was, what the doctors did, that person knew it was time to go.
I learned that when patients would tell either their family members or the staff that they'd just been talking with some loved one who had died years before, that they were getting ready to die and cross over to that specific person or people.
Families would sometimes tell stories about how their loved one would be busy for anywhere from a day to several days, making sure that everything was in order, that certain things were taken care of, that loose ends were tidied up. Somehow, these patients KNEW that it was getting to be that time for each one of them, so they did what they had to. When they would end up in CCU, whether it was a tiny MI or a large one, they knew they were leaving this earth for.....some place else. With who, where exactly, and all the other questions people have about the "what happens after we die part", I can't answer.
But all those people, the ones who told us, who talked to their own lost ones, who tidied up their own lives, they all knew and went all that more quietly for it.
Those who refused to move on, who weren't ready, who's families hadn't made peace with the patient's illness were a whole other story. It was almost like a Pullme-Pushyou situation. It was much harder for all of them.
I think as nurses, we all see death or end of life stories unfolding right before our eyes. Sometimes, we can help both the families and the patients, sometimes the patients or families, and sometimes, in the saddest scenarios, we can't help either.
I remember a patient who came to our unit as a full arrest, intubated, with orders for rotating tourniquets, lasix, foley, drips out the waaaazooo. He looked terrible. His family decided after talking to the doctor to make him a DNR. The next day, during visitor's hour, he coded. The family came out yelling for us to do something. We explained the DNR. Some one yelled, " Call the doctor and DO EVERYTHING FOR HIM!!!!" That revoked the DNR. And we did do everything for him-seven times in that one weekend. We absolutely hated it. After that DNR revocation code, his body turned purple from the waist up and pink from the waist down. I'd read about it in books, but had never seen it. It was a very bad sign. But, no matter what anyone said, the family would not let go of him. After that weekend, he was on the vent, a few drips and he wasn't there anymore. We'd broken his ribs, stuck needles into him everywhere to get blood, you name it, we did it. The nurses didn't understand how a family couldn't see what they were doing to him. Finally, he was shipped out of CCU, stable, unresponsive, to a vent room in the hospital. We heard that he survived for three more months, got pneumonia and finally died. Every nurse who'd been there that awful weekend was so glad and so grateful that he'd finally gotten to leave.
So, depsite that I'm not a hosice nurse, I have worked as a hospice nurse as part of my job description. Remember, formal hospice care, as popular and as widely used as it is today was not always looked upon favorably. So we all had to try to bring the palliative, hospice death with dignity message to our patients and families, wherever we found them.
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