Saturday, July 7, 2007

jennifer and her job

On the way home from the bookstore, jenn decided she wanted to listen to her voicemail from work. She had the phone on speaker and was listening until I had to ask her to please take the phone off speaker mode and just listen normally. Her voicemail was upsetting to me.
Jenn is a Hospice care coordinator. She was a hardcore go-to-actively-dying-people's-homes-and-care-for-them-until-they-die kind of a Hospice care provider until she destroyed her back doing so. There was a lot of lifting and manipulating of people who could not move themselves.
Jenn's work voicemails, from what I've heard, typically have some of the following phrases in the:
Bleeding out- this is where the body loses the ability to maintain its hold on its own blood and the blood starts coming out of all the body holes.
Unable to take fluids- you cannot get your throat to do what you want it to do, because you are actively dying. The same holds true for food, but fluid is worse. Often, husbands, wives or family members will want these people put on introveinious (sp?) fluids to keep them alive, because they do not understand...
The natural course of things- this is where the person you love is coming into the final hours of the actively dying process. Loved ones fight against this. They are often misguided by their own love and want to keep the person alive at all costs, even if the person they love is in some level of torment, or drugged state of not-even-the-person-you-love-anymore. They don't know what they're doing. We all, me included, before anyway, assumed some level of alive is better than none. That is often not the case. Especially in the land of Jenn's voicemail.

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