I spent Wednesday morning at a hospice on the south side of the Clyde.
It may not be how most people would react, but afterwards, standing outside, I turned to my VS tutor and said, “This is going to sound weird, but it seemed like a really happy place.”
I could have said a lot of other things about it. It’s a place that sees a great deal of sadness. It comes as a jolt, no matter how prepared you think you are, to hear that on average, a person who comes in as an inpatient will only be there for eleven days. I saw their fundraising video, and it was powerful and moving and awful, and I tried to hide my tears behind my coffee mug until I remembered that I’m a medical student, not an automaton, and I can have emotions and not be ashamed of them. I was asked what I thought, and I could have said all of those things and all of them would have been true. But the feeling I left with was that it was a happy place, full of people who had made a decision to not dwell on the future but to really live, every minute of every day.
There are a lot of people at this hospice who live at home. They come for the day, once or twice a week. For respite care, for pain control — and for a drink, for a game of bingo, for their art class, for a trip out, for the new gossip. I met a patient who was diagnosed a year ago with untreatable cancer. She had an incredible attitude, a wonderful sense of humour, and such a joy about life. She told me that she’s made new friends and seen places she never would have thought of going and taken up painting and spent more time with her grandchildren, and, yes, sometimes it sucks, but she’s got the good drugs for those parts and she just wants to make the most of the time she has left.
And they don’t hide from the idea of death.
It’s not failure. It’s not something that we should avoid talking about. It can happen with as little pain and as much dignity as possible. It’s considered a natural part of life.
They do good work. I come back to palliative care every so often when I’m ruminating on possible specialties, and I don’t know. I do know that it’s an area the wider medical profession have tended to ignore in the past, and that’s no longer so true and that’s a good thing. I was told when I was sixteen, and many times since, that medicine is the only job that has a 100% failure rate, and in that case, surely making sure that a person experiences the end of their life in the best way possible is every bit as important as how we treat them in all the parts of their life that went before that.
On another but not entirely unrelated note — I think I needed it. I’m in the middle of Block 5 right now. Block 5 is full of biochemistry, dressed up a little bit with the odd point about diabetes. I didn’t like the Kreb’s Cycle at A-level and I didn’t like the Kreb’s Cycle any of the three times during undergrad I was made to suffer through it, so it’s not as though I was expecting to like it any better now, the fourth time around. Two and a bit weeks into that, and I was incredibly grateful for the few hours I got on Wednesday, when I could say, “Yes. That’s why I’m doing this.”
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