Palliative care nurses and doctors have a heavy job. A job I know for SURE I wouldn't be able to handle. I know this because being a pseudo palliative care nurse for 10 days nearly broke me 3 years ago. I have been reluctant to share any of this with any great detail, but it's a life event that truly changed me...
3 years ago we started getting word that Bernice's cancer had returned and it was worse than before. To give you some perspective on that, when she was diagnosed in 2012, her CA125 (the blood marker for ovarian cancer) was around 3,000 (normal is under 20). After that diagnosis she had 8 organs removed and part of another. Obviously it was serious. The return of her tumors in April/May of 2016 had her CA125 markers at well over 5,000. The poor woman was in intense pain...she could hardly sit or walk without being in pain, and her hemoglobin was so darn low that she had basically no energy. And while she carried herself with such grace and poise, she began allowing me to see her more and more vulnerable. With each passing day in the month of May she would allow herself to hand over more and more of her dignity and modesty to me. It was a charge I did not take lightly. Bernice was the most modest and demure woman I've ever known...
Those last 10 days held so much. For every painful experience, there is an equally meaningful beautiful experience. It's the beautiful parts of it that I conjure up when the painful parts start to hurt again. Bernice was a breast cancer survivor many years before I knew her and then she endured this monstrously intense surgery to remove her ovarian cancer tumors years later. The two were totally unrelated. But her modesty, though it was a part of her overt personality, came a lot from the fact that her poor little body had been all but mutilated. A scar from below her breast bone to below her belly button, scars from her post surgery drains, a scar from her port, scars from her mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. She kept it all under wraps. But when she could no longer get dressed without help or bathe without help, she let me help her. And oh how my heart broke to see what she had been put through. To see those purple scars that put faces to the ugly reality of her battles with cancer. It still breaks my heart when I think about it...
Cancer tried to take her dignity, but I fought tooth and nail to try and preserve it through those final days. I knew it meant so much to her. She never wanted to be "sick". I gave her the last bath she ever took. I convinced her that she would rest so much easier if she took a hot shower. But she couldn't walk to the bathroom. She couldn't stand in the shower. She couldn't even truly sit in the shower seat without help because she was in so much pain. So I stepped into that shower with her. I grabbed the gooseneck shower head that I had bought for her at the local medical supply store, I put her arms around my neck and leaned her body against mine, and I ran the warm water over her back. I washed her body with sweet smelling soap and I told her how beautiful she was because I knew how much she was sacrificing to let me see her like that. And she truly was beautiful. Scars and all. She apologized over and over to me and to Brenda. And I told her over and over again what an honor it was for us to have the privilege of caring for her. It was one of the many moments over those last days that pain and beauty intermingled. Where the veil between us and the Father began growing ever thinner...
On her final day I immediately went to her bedside when I woke up at 7:00 as had become my routine over those last several days. I would give her her medications and give her a Tramidol for pain (for the record a Tramidol is basically Ibuprofen...the woman was managing the pain of crippling metastatic cancer with little more than an over the counter medication...). She had a special way of swallowing her pills. She had become an expert at downing meds over her lifetime because she had been in an out of renal illness most of her life starting at a very young age. But that morning, she would open her mouth for me to give her a medication and then forget the rest of her routine. So I would scrape out the pill halfway dissolved and try again with a new pill. After several attempts, I knew it just wasn't going to happen. So I forwent her antibiotic, her steroid, and a couple of other meds she was taking, and I crushed up her Tramidol and tried to feed it to her blended with a bite of yogurt (she hated yogurt but it was all I had). I knew if I didn't get that into her she was going to be in excruciating pain. She begrudgingly swallowed that bite of yogurt and was grouchy at me for feeding it to her. That was ok. I just needed *her* to be ok...
She spent most of that day completely unconscious. She would offer an involuntary sideways smile or maybe a nod here and there, but mostly she was asleep. Her sweet friend Brenda came over in the afternoon to help me change her sheets after I had cleaned her up that morning. Bernice couldn't even roll over. She had no more strength. Before that day she could wrap her arms around my neck and I could lift her into a sitting position and help her swing around to the side of the bed. That day, she didn't have the strength to even lift her arms to my shoulders. So I scooped her up like a child and used every ounce of my strength to move her and try not to hurt her so that we could change her sheets and her bed pads and then her clothes. All of this done without her ever leaving the bed. She groaned in pain. She cried out. It broke my heart. I tried to soothe her by telling her she was beautiful, she was so loved, she was strong...I tried to keep her calm. But the reality of the end being near was more and more real with every click of that minute hand on the clock. We all knew it. Brenda whisked away bed linens and clothes and I rubbed Bernice's feet with Midnight Path lotion. I told her that Jesus loved her and I literally said "Bernice when you see Him, RUN to Him! We will be just fine. Everyone is taken care of. But if you see your Jesus you run and you don't look back..." I certainly didn't want her to leave but I couldn't watch her try to stay any longer...
When she settled back into unconsciousness and I knelt by her bedside and I wept over her. I cried out for God to take her. I'm not sure I've ever prayed a more conflicted prayer in my life. This woman who I adored was leaving this world. I was hours away from living in a world where she no longer existed. It tore my soul to even consider not having her with me anymore. But my God how I wanted her to be freed from her pain and suffering. I wanted her to get her just reward. I truly NEEDED her to hear her Lord tell her "Well done my sweet Bernice. Enter into paradise. You've fought your fight and you've finished your course." I needed her to find rest...
Hours later she was unsettled. I tried to *do* things. I tried changing her bed pads again, but I couldn't do it without Jonathan's help. We tag teamed and tried to lift and shift her. It pained us both to see her body so ravaged. She had the beginnings of bed sores. I called her hospice nurse Blanca asking what in the world I could do...I told her that "the life was literally pouring out of her". It was. It was practically spiraling out of her body and out of her eyes. At some point Jonathan crawled up in bed next to her and held her hands. He called her Mommy. He told her it was ok to go. He soothed her with his sweet low hushed tones in her ears. But when the time came, nobody had the remedy for her agitation. We had pumped her with all the morphine she would take. All the Ativan she could take. But she was leaving...her body was dying...and all we could do was look on and try to tell her that she was beautiful. She was strong. She was loved. She cried out, she gasped, she groaned, and then she was still...and then she took her last breath. And it was done. And yet...there was overwhelming peace...
I've wondered if maybe I lost a little of my mind in those moments, because the only thing I could do was smile when I knew she was free of that body. I should have been distraught, but I wasn't. I was relieved for her. And I just couldn't help but think that at that very moment she was running headlong into the arms of her Jesus and He was smiling ear to ear to welcome her Home. I brought the box that she had asked me to open over to the bed. She specifically had asked me to open it when she was gone. I knew there was joy in that box. Remnants of our sweet Bernice. And oh how I wanted to do something...anything...to make it feel like *she* was still sitting in that room with us. Sometimes I regret opening that box so soon...the perfectionist people pleaser in me will always second guess whether every one of us in that room was ready to hear those words. Maybe I jumped the gun. Maybe I overstepped my place. Or maybe it all really doesn't matter anyway. Ultimately she had planned the most beautiful, personal, moving service of her memorial and it was a true joy to memorialize her the way she wanted to be remembered...
So I say all of that to say that that experience nearly broke me. It came very close. Ultimately it didn't break me...but it changed me. It gave me the experience I needed to be able to minister to my sweet sister friend Rachel when her mother passed away 2 months later, to my sweet sister friend Sara who lost her mother-in-law just after the New Year. I was able to offer my sweet Mimol help in the early stages of her palliative care and it didn't scare me. I was able to help fortify my mother during the loss of her own mother. It taught me the value of a moment...
I will never be the same. In challenging ways but in far more beautiful ways. God picked up my broken pieces and He's putting them back together piece by piece and making something even more beautiful with the mess. I am stronger. I am more vulnerable. I am bolder. I am more easily scared. I am fortified. But I cry much more easily. I am more tenderhearted. I am also more guarded. I've seen true peace. I've felt the presence of God in such a real way that I felt I could have just about reached out and touched Him. In a time in my life that you'd think I would feel far from the Lord...I was losing this woman who I not only adored but whom I truly needed in my life...but instead I felt Him closer than a brother. Beside me, in front of me, behind me, above me, within me. And so I am forever changed because He tore that veil between us in those moments. He showed up for me. And He filled me with His peace, His comfort, His joy. I will never be the woman I was before May of 2016. I am new. And I'm ok with that...
