Sunday, December 18, 2022

Hospice Patients as Human Persons: Where Does Professional Distance Fit?

[The following is my "Reflection" for this coming Tuesday's Inter-Disciplinary Group (IDG) meeting at which we will again discuss and pursue the best possible care for our agency's hospice patients.]

Kathy Reichs is the forensic anthropologist whose life and novels are the basis for the television series Bones with Emily Deschanel starring as Dr. Temperance Brennan. In her first novel, Deja Dead, Reichs writes about the challenges of considering her “patients” as the “persons” they were before they ended up in her care. It reminded me again of what it means to continue seeing our patients as persons.

 Here’s some of what Dr. Reichs writes about that:

 “Day after day I cleaned them up, examined them, sorted them out. I wrote reports. Testified. And sometimes I felt nothing. Professional detachment. Clinical disinterest. I saw death too often, too close, and I feared I was losing a sense of its meaning. I knew I couldn’t grieve for the human being that each of my cadavers had been. That would empty my emotional reservoir for sure. Some amount of professional detachment was mandatory in order to do the work, but not to the extent of abandoning all feeling.”

Shortly after, she adds:

 “I felt for these victims, and my response to their deaths was like a lifeline to my feelings. To my own humanity and my celebration of life. I felt, and I was grateful for the feeling. That’s how it was personal. That’s why I wouldn’t stop.”

 On behalf of this past year of patients, families, and all the other members of the Bridge Hospice Central Coast team whether present or gone, thank you for continuing to care, to feel, and to be human persons together. My hope is that we never stop.

 


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