Welcome back to my weekend reflections, where I dive into the highs and lows of my workweek!
High: It was a two-day work weekend!! Labor Day was on Monday, so I got the day off.
We don’t have to work all the holidays, just the one we signed up for. This year, I will be covering Thanksgiving, so I have time until I work a holiday.
It wasn’t a bad weekend; however, we were short-staffed on Saturday, so we did what we could.
I always joke that on the days we are short-staffed, we actually get more done since we are working nonstop and don’t really get time to think. When you know your workload, you can move at a normal pace instead of breakneck speed to cover your own assignment and your coworkers and your coworkers.
Low: I had four hospice patients in one day. It’s not rare that I see hospice patients; it is rare that I see so many in one day.
I had one in particular that I keep thinking about. And man, does it kill me in this very moment that I don’t know how it all ended with her. Is she alive? Did she say goodbye to her daughter? Did she even have that conversation with her daughter?
I don’t know. I wasn’t there on Monday or any other day to follow up again. It is the worst part about working three days only—you only see the patient for a little bit, you don’t follow all the way to the end with them sometimes. It’s a blessing and a curse in this profession.
I can not stop thinking about the fact that she knew if we flipped her to GIP hospice, she would have about 20 minutes. And yet, in the same sentence, she said, “I want to talk to my daughter, I want to see if she wants me to live another two weeks.” I just did not have the heart to tell her that she may not have that long.
Death does not wait for anyone. Sure, it will tease you. It will make you think it’s giving you time to say goodbye. But all it’s really doing is prolonging the inevitable.
I didn’t have time to process that whole interaction. And as I type, I don’t know if I really have processed it all. All four of my patients are dead. Maybe in another lifetime I had time or the mental capacity, but today, this week, I don’t.