I went back to the hospice and took the tour of the facility. Felt like very little had changed since I had been there working as a nurses' aide 15 years ago.
It felt a little weird to be back, to be in that place again. I was a medical student training to be a doctor, and yet I was there to be a nurses' aide, someone who was really at the patients' bedside to deal with their minute to minute needs. I changed bed pans, helped them bathe, combed their hair, fed them, and helped them with all the little things they were not capable of doing. I also helped to wheel the patients' who smoked cigarettes outside to the patio where they would smoke a cigarette. Most of the patients were dying of cancer.
I remember a mother who was dying of ovarian cancer. She had a son that looked my age, seemed to be in his twenties. Later that evening, I saw him drinking at the local pub around the corner with his friends. Part of me wanted to say hello to him, to comfort him somehow, but I couldn't find any words. There was a thin man who spoke no English, he was from Ethiopia I think. There was an Indian woman who had lost the use of her hands because they were paralyzed, and she had made a beautiful clay coffee mug. The story was that she had molded and painted it with her feet. Those are the little things I remember.
The big thing I remember is when I was asked to help one of the nurses take a woman down to the morgue. If one of the patients died, and this was not a daily occurrence, but it happened maybe once a week or so that someone would die, the nurse who was the main caretaker would be responsible for taking the person to the morgue down in the basement. She was an aged woman with white hair who was thin like my grandmother was before she died. As an aside, I've always had issues with transference around my grandmother's death from lung cancer, relating my patients to her, thinking about how they resemble her. As I cared for this woman in her dying days, I thought a lot about my grandmother. When she died, we moved the woman from her bed to a shaky metal gurney, wheeled it into the freight elevator in the back of the building that went down to the sub-basement. Once we got to the cold room where the metal doors of the morgue were located, we were supposed to lift her off the gurney and transfer her onto the tray that slid out from the wall behind the metal door that would hold her corpse before the body was claimed by the family. I have never had good forearm strength, but I was expecting some kind of warning before we heaved the body. Maybe a one-two-three count, or at least some kind of conversation about how this was going to go would have been helpful. I didn't expect the nurse to start moving the patient so quickly after we stopped rolling the gurney, opened the door, and slid out the metal tray. I was unprepared and unable to lift my side of her, and apparently, dead bodies are heavier than I expected. Unfortunately, I dropped my end, and she crashed to the ground. I have no idea how we lifted her, but we did do so, and we got her onto the tray and slid her behind the cold metal door. All this with no discussion, no words passed between us, no conversation at all. And to this day, I've never told anyone this story.
