Sorry that I haven’t posted anything in about 30 days, I’ve been busy with both my day and night jobs, some family get-togethers, and some damn nice weather that has limited my personal computer time. 🙂
The post today is a sad one, and is a happy one at the same time.
I work for a national healthcare company that specializes in intraveneous (IV), injectible (IM), and inhalation (INH) therapies at home. On service with us, we have people with simple infections that will heal, and we have other people that are terminal and will die any day. Yet, no matter what the disease state, we provide patients with a bit of normalcy to their lives — they don’t have to stay in the hospital for the length of their therapy, or more importantly, they can die at home, at piece and with their family. We provide more than medications — we provide normalcy for patients, and that is such a good thing.
I can’t (and won’t) mention names here, and even first names have been changed to protect the identity of the people in question.
We have a patient on service for about 3 years now, and her name is Michelle. She’s in her early 60’s, and her husband – John – god bless his soul – takes care of her from daybreak to sunset, and all of the time inbetween. Michelle has been on many, many antibiotics with us through the last two years, only because the doctors don’t know what the root cause of her symptoms are. Basically, they don’t know what she has, but they keep trying things to see what works.
Michelle has been stable for quite a while, living a somewhat normal life at home. Sometimes, her WBC counts would get down too low, and she would have to go for a transfusion. John, always by her side, and always acting on her behalf as her spokesperson, morally, ethically, sensibly, and lovingly.
He would e-mail or call me once or twice a week, to let me know how she was doing and to see if we could do certain things, pending insurance clearance or pending MD orders. Or, he would give me the heads up about something happening a week from now, that I might have to handle for him — getting lab results ready, organzing a discharge from the hospital so she could come home over Christmas, or just simply letting him know what he leb results were so he could make a determination on whether or not Michelle needed a transfusion.
This past Thursday, I helped organzie the paperwork and the set the “wheel in motion” so that Michelle could come home over the weekend. She had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and with the doctors not being able to figure out her diagnosis much less a treatment, we were all working against time. Michelle came home on Thursday, went on an antifungal medicine, and the holiday weekend started.
Michelle died, quite peacefully in bed, and in the arms of her husband on May 30th, 2006.
I received a call today from John. Barely able to make complete sentences without breaking down, I could feel the love he had for his wife and I myself, started to lose it a little. Luckily, he asked me a question that I didn’t have an answer to because it’s not my call to make, so the HOLD button here was a lifesaver for me, as I needed to compose myself as much as he. After I found the answer, I told him and he began to tell us how professional we all were, how much we helped Michelle, how much we helped him, and to us, he was forever grateful. He had some other nice things to say about our company and the specific people in my team.
I however went on to thank him. He spent nearly every waking hour caring for his wife, and I thanked him for doing that. My grandfather did the same his wife – my grandmother – for most of her life until her death, and if it’s one thing I admire, it’s devotion to the one you life. I told John this, and after telling him to call or write any time he needs to, whether it’s personal or business, we said our last goodbyes for now, and hung up the phone, both of us not completely composed.
It’s the people like John and Michelle that make the job worth it. Many people care for others, but no one cared for anyone like John did for Michelle. Not at least in my 7 years there have I ever seen anything like it.
John, good luck to you, and Michelle, enjoy the ride and I know you’re in a better place.
“I’d like the memory of me to be a happy one, I’d like to leave an afterglow of smiles day is done. I’d like to leave an echo whispering softly down the ways, Of happy times and laughing times and bright sunny days. I’d like the tears of those who grieve to dry before the sun, Of happy memories that I leave behind when day is done.”