I was working in the Palliative Care Unit at Vanderbilt when the pandemic hit. Palliative Care is a specialty in medical care that focuses on treating the symptoms of a disease that cannot be cured. Sometimes it leads straight into end of life care in a short period of time. I had been doing this work for the past 7 years and found it rewarding and that it was my calling.
Read MoreJOY. Finding it in simple things. It is a wonderful arrival to my mindscape. Sometimes I was too busy over the years to appreciate joy. Does that sound strange? I thought I was depressed. But I was just overbooked. When not overbooked, it can be easy to lose joy again because you are too busy wondering what your purpose is. Instead, forget about it. Appreciate the mundane. This is me, talking to me, but I have to say, it’s all worth the grand efforts in pausing.
Read Morethere is something ingrained in me about how much I'm 'supposed to work' every week and then I come home and do my other job - being a creative - or is that 'for fun?' In the culture of addictive processes we find ourselves telling each other that it's good for us to be jammed up all the time, but I don't think it's healthy! There is so much talk around 'self-care' and 'work life balance' but damnit they just become buzzwords that we end up resisting in lieu of proving to ourselves we need to be superheroes instead of mastering resting.
Read MoreOH PLANS!!! I’m still making them, just more and more cautiously and less frequently. This week I felt depressed for a few minutes because I didn’t have anything to do requiring advanced amounts of my brain or talent of any sort. I wanted to rejoice that I’m now planning ‘resting,’ and I’m finding it but not without some despair. I want to be useful. “What am I doing with my time?” I am called to be of service in my life, yet right now I must serve me. It is a mysterious ride to be on, and I feel like I’m going around and around with i
Read MoreI was on the way to work a night shift when I learned I had ‘a cancer’ in my breast. I really thought it was the hospital calling to tell me I had to float to another unit or that we were overstaffed or something, but it turned out to be the results of a recent biopsy I’d had. Of course, having the biopsy alerted me to the possibility of such a situation but I had tucked it away as something I’d ‘hoped was wrong.’ But ‘I knew all along.’
I worked my shift that night with that new knowledge, and I couldn’t even speak of it because I would have fallen apart. I took care of my patients that night extra carefully and in the downtime googled reasons why I might have given this to myself. I had a hard night. I couldn’t call anyone. It may have been the longest night of my entire life.
Read Morehe inspiration for ‘Dance of Caring Souls’ came from a tattoo Dara got when she first moved to the US from Ireland. The tattoo was based on ‘the Dance’ by Henri Matisse. Later as she was completing her graduate program in Nursing, the image was part of her studies in a nursing textbook demonstrating the Theory of Caring.
To me, this song is an anthem to caregivers around the world, joining hands in peace, with the mission to take good care and support each other not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually as well. It’s also a thank you note to all of the great teachers we have had that have taught us to care deeply in so many ways…
We all hold a few names… that guided us along the way… they’re the ones who twirled with us… in the dance of care and love
Read MoreAnna Marie Henderson and I wrote this song a year ago just when we were figuring out how to thrive in a pandemic. We had been sitting and talking about how it was all going and she told me the story of one of her patients who was very ill and asked her to ‘stop for a minute and hold her hand.’ There is one room on our unit where you can see a small tree growing outside the window and when she was sitting and holding her hand, she saw raindrops falling ‘like teardrops from a branch’ and as time passed the patient was comforted and more relaxed.
We also talked about what is like to work a 12 hour shift in such an intense environment. We work in the Palliative and Hospice care environment and we see so many different types of patients in all age ranges that are getting close to the end of their lives. We spend our days comforting not only the patients but also their family and friends and Anna and I both find it to be very meaningful work that we are blessed to do. We talked about how we come home, sometimes depleted and we turn to our significant others to ‘stop for a minute and hold our hands’ (or our broken bodies from the stress of the day!)
What I love about this song is that it’s a reminder that we are all her and present to care for each other, no matter what the role is. Sometimes in that ‘pause’ is where we realize where we need to take a breath and re-center our focus on what is going on, and it benefits not only the patient, but ourselves and our co-workers as well.
Read More
