Hospice Nurse Eats Half Her Weight in Ice-Cream

It’s April 2020. I haven’t blogged since late September. That was then. This is now.

I am sitting on the sofa and rain is beating down on the skylight. I am eating ice-cream from a mug with a knife. The ice-cream has raisins and honey in it, because these are things I found in the kitchen, and I haven’t been to the grocery store in a while. The knife? No clean spoons. Life has been very surreal recently, with the pandemic and all, but really, how much stranger did it have to become?

I am a hospice nurse, so every day at work I meet people who have been told they have six months or less to live. I long ago gave up trying to imagine what this must feel like. I just hope in my every interaction with these people to be kind and gentle, not to say anything too thoughtless. Keeping in the forefront of my mind their tenuous relationship with the future can be exhausting. Imagine what it must be like for them.

I have been present when my patients took the Aid in Dying medications, legally ending their lives in the presence of friends and family. You don’t walk out of those visits feeling that the world is anything but surreal.

Early 2020, along comes Covid-19. Nobody has any immunity to it. Kind of like death in general, like the entire human race just qualified for hospice. But now, everyone’s buying up zinc lozenges and rigatoni and toilet paper. My hospice patients never panic buy dry goods. I guess they know better.

People keep asking me whether I am safe doing my work during the pandemic. The short answer is, I wish I knew. But I think you can say the same of anyone who sets foot in a grocery store right now. Working in healthcare has its own specific set of risks, of course. And I know the two questions they are really asking: Are you nursing people with the virus? Do you have enough protective gear at hospice? Same answer: I wish I knew. 

My hospice has its store of gloves, gowns, and masks with face shields. We nurses all have at least one N95 mask in our car stock. There are solid plans in place to keep us supplied with protective gear as needed. The problem is, nobody knows how much that will be. Every Thursday, we have to let our supervisor know our projected PPE needs for the next week. On Monday afternoons, we drop by the office and pick up our allotment in a baggie with our name on it. A volunteer gives them out. Last week, my baggie had a pink paper cutout heart in it too. 

We are only making essential in-person nursing visits. You know, for hands-on things like wound care, critical end of life symptom management, and lots of bowel stuff you really don’t want me to describe in any sort of detail.

Every day I don’t have to put on a blue gown and N95 with face shield is a good day. I mean, it’s just really hard to look cool in those plastic gowns. I’m pondering this fashion dilemma as I get a new tub of Ben & Jerry’s from the freezer. To be fair, the first tub only had a few spoonfuls left. It’s not that I’m bingeing on ice-cream. But why do they have to put a crackly plastic seal that you need a sharp knife to open because you can never find the perforations? I’m jabbing at the seal with a knife and I’m imagining how fun it would be to have to go to the ER during a global pandemic with a Ben & Jerry-related knife injury.

It would not be fun. But it would be no less fun than breathing fiberglass. I say this because of the homemade face mask thing. The CDC vacillated for weeks over whether cloth masks for the general population were a good idea, even though South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan had already clearly demonstrated that they were. Finally they said ok, yes, sew yourselves some t-shirt masks. 

Meanwhile, somebody figured out that HEPA vacuum cleaner bags filter out 97% of particles, so they’d be a great thing to stick inside your homemade t-shirt masks, no? No! Because after I did this, and breathed a couple days’ worth of air through my homemade masks, somebody else noticed that HEPA vacuum cleaner bags are made of fiberglass. So now, even if I survive Coronavirus, I’ve been breathing fiberglass for two days.

There’s just not enough ice-cream to go round right now.

On the upside, I’m seeing a whole lot more of my teen during ‘the Covid’ as the Irish are calling it. This is a good thing, even if the stress of a global pandemic has made her just a tiny bit more spacy than usual. I came home the other day from work and our front door was wide open. Teen was not home. I texted her. How long had our front door been wide open with nobody home? She could not say. A couple of days later, I come home from work to find the front door closed but with the key in it. I text her. Progress! Her response: Leaving the door open is really safe cos robbers will just assume you’re home. If you close your door but don’t lock it they’ll be like, stupid people, I’m gonna steal their stuff.

I’m not sure where the door with a key in falls on this spectrum. But I am loving on the more time with my teen thing. I did have to show her one day where my red folder of Important Papers In Case Mom Dies is in the basement. That was a special moment. We had a chat about it. During our chat, it was established that she would prefer if I didn’t die. Oddly, I feel the same way about her. I’m guessing these special chats are happening all over the planet right now. Sort of makes me feel like having a little ice-cream.