hi. so pamie gave me a little link because I made a donation to the Oakland Public Libraries. everyone should be making donations to libraries. enough said. go read pamie and learn how you can do it too.

but back to my life.

Sweets and I are training for a marathon. In fact, I should be out running today. We're following a training schedule we read about in a running magazine and today I need to be pounding four miles worth of pavement. All so that on Sunday I can do a "long slow day." I'm sorry, but any run that is supposed to be 10 miles is almost guaranteed to be a "long slow day." Silly rabbit.

I had another death at work the other day. It's very different when the patient is totally comatose when you first meet them. Since I've started working at hospice, most of my patients have died within a week or two of meeting them. But usually I get to see a little bit of their personality before they drift off into the sleepy pre-death stage. Wednesday one of my patients was exactly at death's door, where she'd been hanging for about a week. She'd had no visitors for that entire week, in fact.

She was in her bed, in the darkest room at hospice, just barely breathing. panting, really. I checked on her about every twenty minutes, and she was just trucking along. I even sat with her for a brief period and we had a little talk about how it was time to go. I usually do this with the patients who just linger, because maybe they need to hear that everything is going to be okay. I praise them for the hard work they're doing, and let them know that their family is going to be okay without them. It's just part of my work.

There was something about this patient that made me want to be away from the bedside when she died. As her breathing became more and more shallow, I had the frantic thought that I needed to get out of there- that Apaches aren't supposed to be around people when they die. In any case, I had work to do, so I couldn't just sit with her waiting for something we weren't even sure was going to happen on my shift. I continued to check on her throughout the day, until she died at 12:16pm. Then I cleaned up her body and sent her to the funeral home. I called her daughter, and had a short conversation with her where I got the distinct impression that the nurses at work weren't the only ones relieved to hear that she had finally died. The daughter said that the patient was known for having a strong and stubborn heart "just like her father." That was all I really ever learned about the patient. She was scared of dying and she had a strong heart.

My dad once came upon a car accident where the driver of the car was just taking his last breaths. Instead of waiting it out with the dying man, my dad chose to leave the scene and let him die in private. The thought of having extra spirits buzzing around your life is a seriously bad thing for us, and he made the choice to avoid that all together. I think I will need to be super careful of people and their spirits as they are dying in my modern life. This is my job, you know? I try to be as respectful as possible with the bodies, and I have my little things I do once I leave work each time there is a death. I hope this is enough.