Through my experience volunteering with the Hospice of the Piedmont, I have met many people and have listened to their life stories. Some interactions have been brief, lasting only hours. Others have been more consistent, giving me a deeper, more complete experience with caring for the terminally ill. One such interaction was with Jim and his wife Susan. When I first met Jim, he was already ravaged by the late stages of terminal pancreatic cancer. Before I sat with him, I was told that he was an HVAC technician and had worked day in and day out for 45 years, never taking a vacation. He had just recently retired, and he and his wife were planning their retirement. They were going to do some traveling before settling into a home closer to their son and his family. Jim wasn’t retired for two months before he got the diagnosis.
When I got the chance to sit with Jim, he was largely unresponsive and in terminal delirium. Every couple of minutes, like clockwork, he would throw up his hands, a weak wail escaping from his gaping mouth. I would grab a hold of his hand and calm him down a bit. There was one particularly frantic episode where Jim tried to get out of the bed, mumbling that he had to get ready for work. Again, I grabbed his hand and told him that he did not have to go to work that day and could rest in bed. I knew that Jim never would have known my name or remembered me, but I realized how powerful simply being there for him could be.
The next time I visited Jim, his wife Susan was there. When she was in the room with him, the difference was night and day. Tension in his body melted away the moment she stepped foot in the room. I talked with Susan at length. She loved talking about Jim, about how they met, about how he would surprise her with flowers after he came home from work, about how he pretended to love her cooking. Once we knew each other a bit better, I asked her how hard it was to be losing Jim so early into her retirement. She replied that it was the hardest pain she had ever felt in life. They had been through so much together and had been married for over 40 years, but she was incredibly grateful for the brief time they’d spent with each other reconnecting after he retired.
My hospice experience has changed how I approach the idea of death and dying. I used to think that death was the enemy, to be avoided at all costs and through whatever measures necessary. If I had to take one piece of wisdom away from my experience, it would be that death is in fact not the enemy—it can sometimes be a welcome friend, the bittersweet end to a time of suffering. Intensive medical interventions at the end of life rarely do the patient any good, and in many cases, they just end up causing more suffering. In my future aspirations as a physician-scientist, I hope to take what I have learned with me every day I walk into the clinic, focusing on the quality and not just the length of life. Life itself can be incredibly cruel and unfair, but we as physicians must do our best to care for those in need and do all that we can to end undue suffering.