This study was brought to my attention: A study of 117 nursing students examines their communication skills in having difficult conversations with patients near the end of life. Researchers noted one major theme: “delivering bad news is difficult.” Students expressed “fear, sadness, stress, feeling awkward, and a general lack of self-confidence in communicating bad news.” […]
I was thinking about life and living the other day——- what? doesn’t everybody? Anyway, I envisioned life as a line. Birth, living, dying, death is how life unfolds. We are born with labor to get into this world. We learn how to eat, to sleep, and to socialize as part of being alive. Then we […]
When you or someone you know has been told by a physician that they have a disease that may not be treatable or if treatment is an option where the chances of cure or remission are slim, life as we know it changes instantly. We enter a phase of life that we have no preparation […]
Dear Barbara, How important is spirituality and how do you reach out to a non-religious person who believes the end is the end? One of the “End of Life Rules” in supporting someone is to accept them with their belief system. It is not our place to try to share our beliefs, only to support theirs. […]
Dear Barbara, I’m a caregiver and I’m so beat up. When do I just say I’ve done all I can? Now! Sounds like you’ve reached your limit. It’s time to put your “oxygen mask on.” You can’t provide good care when you are “so beat up.” That isn’t good for you. And it isn’t good for […]
Someone asked me what role I see chaplains fulfilling in end of life care. In reflecting on that question it occurred to me that chaplains tends to get lost in the shuffle of patient care. It is the least understood and often the least accessed of the hospice services provided. Sadly, to everyone’s loss. Hospice […]
Dear Barbara, Can you recommend a book guiding a new hospice volunteer (me) with spiritual support to a dying person whose views are very different from my own? I do not have a book to recommend that tells you how to support a patient with spiritual views other than your own. BUT I can tell […]
In the early 1980s I was in an antique/junk kind of shop and saw an old beat up picture frame with a faded poem written in it. Gone From My Sight was the poem’s name. I smiled when I read the poem, thought “how beautiful,” and bought the framed poem. Fast forward to 1985. As a hospice […]
I did a podcast with Mary Anne Oglesby-Sutherly called Aging, Angst & Alleluia’s. Among other things, she is a Dementia Doula. I had not heard of that term before and now that I have, I’m hooked. Doula is an ancient Greek word meaning a woman who serves. That word has evolved into today’s world slightly […]
“Dear Barbara, My mother passed two hours after being given a second shot of morphine and sedative. It was my fault. I panicked thirty minutes after the first dose. I thought my mom’s breathing should have been slowing down after the first shot so I called the nurse and asked if Mom could have a little more. […]
