10:07 p.m. 2003-08-03
The Bitch says: remembering the good ones
I just keep coming here and not updating. I get interested in something else and forget I didn't even write in my diary which is why I came here in the first place. Work has been going pretty good for a change except for one of my favorite patients. She's 94 years old and has advanced leukemia. She's been on a slow slide downhill for a few months but, the slide got real fast this week. She is now inpatient hospice and hasn't taken anything by mouth in about 3 days. We d/ced all of her po(by mouth) medicines and put sub q ports in(meaning there are open accesses for drugs by injection. Pretty much all she's getting is morphine for pain and ativan for the restlessness and agitation. I am really going to miss this lady. I went to the doctor (oncologist) with her about a year ago and she was telling me about her life. She lived in Michigan near the lake. Most of the people there were summer visitors but she lived there year round. She had a neighbor that came up on the weekends and she noticed that his driveway was always impassable because of snow. She started getting out there on Friday(this is at the age of about 55 or 60) and shoveling out his driveway for him. She never told him she was the one doing it. One weekend he came to her house complaining about the person who was shoveling his driveway because they were putting the snow on his hedge and it was dying because of the load. She still didn't tell him but she never shoveled out his driveway again. She said he should have been thankful that someone was making getting to his house a little easier.
But, this is the problem with working with geriatrics......they are so cool to talk to and then they die. She is definately one of the special ones.
Enough rambling.......
I'M OUTTA HERE
