“I’m trained as a nurse practitioner – all the care I provide is in people’s homes in the inner city.”
“I care for one couple who are Filipino. She is on home dialysis with diabetes, and he’s just frail. But because we go visit them and bring the telemedicine equipment, we can consult with the nephrologist in the hospital. So we can keep them in their home. And they are so happy. He looks after her, but they are both in wheelchairs. They both sit in their wheelchairs watching TV, laughing. They feel to us like a success story because we are keeping them in their home. If they weren’t, they’d probably be in separate nursing homes.”
“When you go into someone’s home, it is a different power relationship. I am a guest. You kind of have to win them over. A lot of the folks who are living at home in dire circumstances, or in supported circumstances, are there because they are fiercely independent. So they don’t like this bossy nurse telling them what to do.”
My philosophy is that the rich and the poor, the sick and the well, the young and the old – we all need each other.
“We need each other to be more human. The older folks that I look after, they have to learn graciousness and acceptance of their decline. It will be my turn to do that some time too – maybe sooner than I want. The younger people need to learn compassion. How else are we going to learn it? So, we need each other, all of us. That’s my philosophy of work.”
“We are supposed to talk about end of life with everyone. A couple of folks I asked them where they would like to die – hospital or at home. They got really offended. Because only God can tell. That’s up to God. That’s not for them to choose.”
“How do learners react to the home visits?”
“It depends where I take them. If I take them to one of the nice apartments where everything is nice and tidy, that’s great. That’s usually a person with dementia, so that’s kind of baffling for new learners to really see full blown dementia living at home. It looks scary. And then I have a guy who lives in a cockroach infested place. And that’s always a shocker. But he is content. He’s living the way he wants, and he gets to choose. I just come with respect and don’t put my bag down anywhere.”
“What do you get out of your work?”
“I get to walk around every day. That’s a silly little benefit, but I like it a lot. I walk around to all my patients’ houses. What else do I get? It’s really challenging. It’s really challenging medically and humanly speaking. So, it’s good. I like the work.“
The comments section is closed.