confronting fear | betsybeadhead

I like the idea of hospice. They are trained for care, not cure. They help a person die a natural death, rather than unnecessarily prolonging life. They don’t do assisted suicide, but they don’t do feeding tubes and ventilators either.

But I don’t like it in a way. I don’t like that there has to be a division between them and the rest of the medical profession.

I have a friend who trained to be a nurse. She learned nothing about what the dying process is – what the signs are, what is normal, what to do. She’s asking me what the signs are, what happens.

There is also a misunderstanding about what hospice does. When my Mom was dying, I assumed that the very infrequent visits from the hospice team were because we were on Tenncare. I was used to us getting the short end of the stick, the last of the loaf. I was used to having to sit in clinics for hours for treatment for everything. So seeing a nurse for about thirty minutes every day seemed par for the course. Having a “bank” of time for a sitter seemed normal too. There was a total of 20 hours I could use, so I had to be careful how I budgeted it.

Turns out that is the way it goes. From reading up more, and from the stories from my mother-in-law having hospice care, we weren’t unusual.

When you call hospice, they are there to help, but the family members are the primary caregivers. They are drafted into service, shanghaied even. They do most of it. The nurses come by to change medicine if necessary. The rest of everything? That is on you.

They don’t sit with the patient 24 hours a day until they die. They don’t check them into a specialized hospital and care for them. It is on the family to do the heavy lifting, literally and metaphorically.

They might provide a handbook that helps. If you are lucky, all the pages are there. Sometimes they aren’t. Fortunately, these days, you can look up “Signs of death” online and get a lot of helpful advice.

Ideally, all nurses and doctors would understand that death isn’t something to be feared. It is a natural part of life. It is only scary if it is unknown – like everything else. Fear comes from ignorance – learn as much as you can and you’ll not be afraid.

I’m pretty sure I’m doing WordPress wrong.

I’ve read that I’m supposed to put pictures in all my posts. I’ve read that I’m supposed to “follow” a lot of other similar blogs, and comment on them. I’ve read that I should post several times a day.

Well, I do that part, sometimes. And then I think that I’m overwhelming people.

But how am I supposed to follow other blogs when I barely have time to work on mine? How am I supposed to comment on them if I don’t read them? And how would that get me more followers?

I’m pretty sure that a lot of my followers don’t even follow my blog. I have nearly 200 followers and really only about 20 people manage to saunter over and look at what I’ve written every day. Are the rest those people who do blogging for money? They “followed” my blog with the hope that I’d “follow” theirs, and they’d get a percentage of a penny just because I clicked on their blog? Maybe.

As for pictures, I have pictures sometimes. But they are my own. I’m not going to take stock photos and paste them on my blog. That’s stealing. Well, it’s stealing unless you give proper credit. But then if a picture is worth a thousand words, how much more are worth actual words? A picture doesn’t mean anything without a context, and the viewer can make up whatever she wants. I’d rather write about what I see than show it, most of the time. I feel that it means more, and that the meaning is better expressed this way.

Mostly I write because I need to write. Setting up a goal of posting at least once a day makes it something I have to do. It makes me accountable to myself. It makes me take the time to put down my thoughts. I don’t need to post, but it seems to force me to think more clearly about what I say. And, if someone gets something useful out of it, all the better. But first and foremost, I write for myself.

I’ve learned things through writing that I never would have learned otherwise. Writing forces me to slow down and see the situation from many perspectives. Writing is an intentional, focused act. Writing keeps me conscious and alert.

I’ve got lots of things I want to write about, but not a lot of time. Plus, I think my recent sprained wrist is in part because I’ve been writing so much. So, I have to choose carefully what I write. Sometimes it may not seem like it. Sometimes I just need to “doodle” to get started. Sometimes I write about a fluffy thing in order to warm up to something bigger. Sometimes I avoid writing about something big and real and controversial and new because I’m afraid.

Sometimes I write because I want to confront my fears, and drag them out kicking and screaming into the light.

So I may not do WordPress the way I’m supposed to do it. But I do it the way I need to do it, and I think that is really the point of everything. It certainly is the point of my blog. Don’t do things the way everyone else does it if it doesn’t serve you.