Why I didn’t want to attend Severn Hospice!
4 December 2009
My Macmillan nurse suggested that I might like to attend Severn Hospice once a week as a day patient.
My first thought was: Why would I want to go and sit in a room full of terminal cancer patients?
My second thought was: Oh no! They are going to make me play with sticky backed plastic and blunt scissors.
My third thought was: I am sick to the gullet of being in hospitals, this will be more of the same.
But my MacMillan Nurse said, “Give it a go, if you don’t like it no-one will make you keep going, and you might find it helpful”
So I did.
Why would I want to go and sit in a room full of terminal cancer patients?
We are all ill, but what do we gain by sitting in a room together and having cancer at each other?
The answer isn’t all that gooey stuff that leaflets trot out about emotional support and sharing problems. We don’t sit and tell each other about all our terrible symptoms, or hold hands and say “There, there, you poor dear!” At least very rarely.
It is however restful to be with other people that you can casually mention a problem or symptom to without hijacking the conversation. If I say to one of my friends, “My catheter balloon burst today, so I’m wearing pads for a few days until I heal enough to have a new catheter put in,” They immediately smother me in sympathy, the entire conversation becomes about me and my health.
I don’t want to hide things from my friends, but they lack the perspective to know that this kind of event is an irritation and nuisance in the life of someone with cancer, not an all consuming disaster needing cotton wool coddling and boxes of chocolate.
If however I made the same statement to another patient at the hospice they would make a brief comment “Oh that’s rough” and the conversation moves on, because maybe one of them is going for an MRI scan next week, or someone else is feeling nauseous from chemo, or needs to be admitted full time to get their pain management under control. Here my problems are put in an every day perspective. At home I am the ill person, the focus of all the visiting nurses, doctor and social workers, the person who needs looking after. When I am at Severn Hospice I am an equal among equals. No more special or no more a nuisance than everyone else.
Oh no! They are going to make me play with sticky backed plastic and blunt scissors
Over the years I’ve visited friends and relatives in various residential and care homes, and I’ve seen them in “occupational therapy” that consisted of sticking precut bits of card together in such a mindless way it could hardly appeal to anyone with more than a handful of functioning brain cells. As an artist and craftswoman I dreaded such non creative “make work”. Arrrrgh lemme out!!
Of course that was before I met Crafty Helen. Now Crafty Helen is in charge of finding us interesting and entertaining things to do at Severn Hospice in Telford. When she came and introduced herself I regarded Crafty Helen with the utmost suspicion. Was this person going to make glue glitter on card, or force me to learn how to knit? In fact she turned out to be the keeper of a magic cupboard full of wonderful materials, papers and mysterious oddbobs that I could use in whatever way my creative mind could devise. Neither was I compelled to take part, if I wished to read a book, just chat, or compete in a written quiz I could do that instead, or not, just as it pleased me.
I am sick to the gullet of being in hospitals, this will be more of the same
On my various stays in hospital and my visits to outpatients and treatment centres, I have spent all too much time in hospital waiting rooms and lounges. Since the advent of H1N1 (swine flu) there often isn’t even the traditional pile of tatty magazines to distract your boredom. Also for someone with low core body strength and radiation burns on their butt, the chairs in hospital lounges are distinctly “unloungy”. So the idea of sitting around in that kind of place from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon was distinctly unappealing.
Arriving to an open pleasant sunny room and having a reclining chair found for me allayed my fears as to physical comfort. They have a variety of chairs and sofas, normal, reclining, wheelchairs. Whatever you need to be comfortable they will get or find.
At 11am the booze trolley came round, this was definitely not like a hospital lounge.
With Reiki treatments, massage and manicure/pedicure treatments available it was infinitely more civilised.
You may have other worries about coming to the hospice
Those were the worries I had about attending Severn Hospice. Your concerns may be different.
One of the other people who attended the hospice said that she had worried about being made to sit in a circle and talk about her problems. That doesn’t happen either.
I can only pass on the advice that my MacMillan Nurse gave me. If you are offered the chance to attend Severn Hospice, give it a try for a few weeks. If you don’t like it the Hospice police won’t force you to keep going there.
So come along. You might like it.
Read other posts in Val’s diary here:
2 June 2010 – Hooray for corsets
3 March 2010 – It’s your funeral
24 February 2010 – So what is a stent?
10 February 2010 – A nice cup of tea
3 February 2010 – The joys of negative thinking
26 January 2010 – My secret tattoos
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part II)
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part I)
6 January 2010 – Of vampires and vaccinations
29 December 2009 – Beauty and fashion
