A Walk In the Valley: Stories of Love, Loss, Life and Hospice

By Lindy M Messerly

A Registered Nurse relates her experiences with death from her first job in a small, rural hospital to various specialties like  Phoenix Childrens Hospital's Broncho Pulmonary Dysplasia unit, a hands on training unit where high risk premature infants with lung disease resided and their parents were trained to care fo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lindy M Messerly
• Release date: Jan 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578714912

Book preview

The Beginning

During my last two years of high school I heard announcements about former students who had been killed in Viet Nam. My graduating class was divided into draftees and college students. Some of my peers went to antiwar protests. I went to nursing school because of the war. I wanted to help my friends and others who went to Vietnam and came back different men—men with secrets and hollow eyes.

Thankfully the war ended in 1975. I decided to follow the returning soldiers to rehabilitation, which ended up being only part of my story, before I realized the Connie connection.

Connie was my baby sister who died when I was very young. She led me to my grown-up work with the dying and eventually to hospice.

One of the perks of nursing as a career is the ability to change environments. For three years I worked in an intense setting, spinal cord rehabilitation, followed by a year of school nursing. After that, I worked two years with infants in the broncho-pulmonary dysplasia unit and then completed another year of nursing in elementary schools.

After fifteen years of hospice nursing, I returned to school nursing. Children brought life and replenished my soul and spirit.

When I was ready to return to hospice work I had an extremely disheartening experience due to what I would describe as unethical practices. The hospice company was definitely in hospice to make money by bending the Hospice Medicare Benefit to the point of detriment to the patient. I itemized my concerns in writing for the director without success. That was the end of my active hospice career, however I continue to believe strongly in the philosophy and value of hospice.

My father, some of my friends or their spouses, and a few coworkers have died. Many close to me faced life’s end with hospice organizations and positive experiences. Some died without hospice. Some died not so peacefully.

Because I have seen firsthand how people can die with beauty and dignity, I want to inform people about the programs and practices of hospice, and the Hospice Medicare Benefit that Medicare-eligible people are entitled to receive. I want everyone who wants a home or hospice-residence death to be able to choose that.

I want people who tell me today, I thought all hospices were the same, to know that is not necessarily true. There is a variety in hospice care; people do have choices in how they die, and their families have choices in how they say goodbye.

I want to lead people to the opportunity of a good death for patient and family, the beloved and the survivors. I know it can happen because I’ve been there.

Death in the Hospital

When I was eighteen, I worked as a nurse’s aide to put myself through college. I worked in a small, rural hospital in Dixon, Illinois. Of course, this place reflected a microcosm of society that all small rural hospitals capture. I saw everything that went on, and I also built a foundation of knowledge that I have carried with me throughout my professional nursing career.

Mrs. Phaneuf was a beautiful elderly lady. She had gray-brown hair and big brown eyes. She always wore a pink night jacket. Her family must have visited during the day, because I never saw them; I worked nights and weekends. I knew she was well taken care of by someone. Each night I brought Mrs. Phaneuf her chocolate milkshake. She would smack her lips and smile, reaching forward with her elegant hands to grasp the fancy glass and spoon.

As time went on her response to the milkshake lessened. She no longer smiled. She no longer reached up. Finally, she couldn’t hold the heavy glass any longer and I divided the milkshake into smaller and smaller portions. One day she told me, I never want to see another chocolate milkshake. Her voice was faint and tremulous. The next night she slept through snack time, still wearing her beautiful pink bed jacket.

I had a few days off and when I returned, Mrs. Phaneuf was gone. She had died peacefully in her sleep. She was the first death I experienced in my professional life, the first of many.

The newlyweds were next. Josh was as yellow as a pumpkin. It was hard not to stare at him. Liver cancer, the doctor said, too far gone for treatment.

His wife was a tall, big-boned woman, and she followed the doctor out into the hall shouting, He can’t have cancer! He’s only nineteen! We just got married!

The doctor looked embarrassed, and walked away as the shouting continued, even after the elevator door closed.

The next night this formidable young lady dragged her six-foot tall husband out of bed. He was too weak to walk alone, so she threw his arm over her shoulder and half-carried him while he struggled to take steps out of the room toward the elevator. His skin was bright orange-yellow from head to toe although the whites of his eyes remained stark as snow. He looked bewildered.

We’re getting out of here! she told him, as she dragged him through the hallway. If they can’t help us we’re going home!

I watched, astounded as this happened and I remember thinking, You’re right to go home if he can’t be helped. You are right. He will be much more comfortable at home. In 1968 I was already thinking hospice thoughts.

Three days later we read in the paper that Josh died.

The Wisdom of the Comatose

When I came to work one day as an aide at Dixon Hospital, the hospital staff was treating a man named Mathias who was in a coma as the result of a motor vehicle accident. I chose to act as if he could hear me at all times. I told him what I was doing as I bathed him and moved his arms and legs. I told him when I was going to turn him to his side and I rubbed his back with lotion as carefully as I would have rubbed the back of a person who would respond and say, Ahh, that feels good! Conversely, I noticed some of the staff ignored Mathias. I thought they treated him like a vegetable, and even talked about his prognosis in front of him. I was young and inexperienced, but I thought that was wrong. I turned on his music player whenever I was in the room, thinking to myself, that’s what I would like if I were in his situation.

After six weeks Mathias came out of the coma. He had a lot to say. You were mean, he told one aide. You played my music for me, he told me. I could hear every word you said, he told everyone.

Mathias’ enlightening comments were quite a lesson for hospital staff in an era when we were being taught in nursing school that comatose people weren’t there, infants couldn’t feel pain, and if a cancer patient could sleep they obviously weren’t in pain. Many of these beliefs have since been proven to be unfounded and harmful.

The Worst Death of All

After I graduated from my college nursing program I returned to the small, rural hospital in Illinois and took the only job available: the night shift with obstetrics and pediatrics. I liked both of these specialty areas, but I was inexperienced and relied quite heavily on reports from the nurses who had been on shift before me, as well as those from the night supervisor who was a nurse of many decades and as