The stories our staff are a part of last a lifetime. For me, watching my Dad travel his last journey from the window was one I will continue to relive the rest of my life. It will be a memory I cherish and embody as I continue to teach, mentor, and empower our Healthcare Heroes to have the impact on the stories they are a part of that ultimately bring connection, joy and purpose to the journeys of self, staff, residents and families.
As we come up to the three year anniversary of my father’s passing I am reminded that no amount of personal or professional death experiences could have prepared me for what I saw from outside the window. Nothing has ever made me feel so close, yet so far away and heartbroken. What I have learned along this journey is that the "thing" that has the greatest impact on suffering is how we love each other through it.
From outside the window, I could see my Mom and Dad struggling but I couldn't reach them to provide the love and support my "daughterness" was charged to provide. My heart was breaking, and all I could do was trust and pray that the people inside the room were loving them like I couldn't.
I think about how many of our staff have been the only people in the room with the family standing on the outside. The tears, anger, grief and despair our staff supported, felt, and digested in each room they entered over the course of Covid is unimaginable to me. We were one family, how many thousands of families did they replace in the room?
Brene` Brown says that in order to go to someone else's humanness, you have to go somewhere inside of yourself that knows what that feels like. If you think of all the feelings they felt inside the window multiple times a week, imagine all that on top of putting their lives on the line, on top of having a variety of family experinces they were having on the outside.
There are very few things on our checklist that we do "to" people, that we carry home with us, it's how we feel about what happened is what we carry home. An accumulation of these experiences become the things I as a health care worker hurdle on the way into work, if there is no place to debrief, refresh and refocus. I disengage, quit and leave the industry entirely for a less "human experience". We are not supporting or acknowledging the emotional toll supporting others have.
A few weeks after my father's passing I dropped by the Moments Hospice Office in St. Cloud, MN. I wanted to talk to the nurse who met with my family. I wanted to make sure she knew her impact on our family and our story. As fate would have it around the corner came a tired frazzled nurse who asked what my Dad's name was, when I told her she immediately started to apologize about not being able to get him on Hospice that day and how nice my family was. I stopped her, as I could no longer look at the defeat on her face. It was clear it had been a long hard road with this conversation being way to familiar to her and the look of failure oh her face was at best heartbreaking.
I needed her to understand the impact she had on us. I looked her square in the eye's and said "you don't really know what you did for us that day do you?" I said "If it wasn't for you, we would have never been allowed in the building, you opened the door. If it wasn't for you, I would have never gotten to know where the best fishing spot was, so i can smile every time I pass it. If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have been able to hold him, tell him I loved him and say goodbye. Because of you, everyone of us kids got our time with him and left with amazingly peaceful memories, instead of the nightmares we would have had from the window. I told her i had no words for how grateful we were to her, and thanked her for gifts she gave us that will last a lifetime. With tears rolling down our cheeks, I hugged her and left.
As professional caregivers, little to no emphasis is put on our contribution to the human experience of our residents and families and even less on the impact it has on our own human experience in the process. We don't always get to see or hear about the impact of our support, which is unfortunate because it is the fuel that keeps us motivated, engaged and present with each other.
I have been in this industry for over 30 years and as I reflect on the systems, processes and procedures that have driven our agencies and defined our routines, falls short of supporting the people who operate our systems. To date I have never seen the degree of burnout, the intolerance we have for each other and the shear inability to see or hear each other and a significant increase in the reporting of staff bullying each other than I do today. We have an opportunity to help us all get back to each other, we need to take it.
In the last 12 years I have grown to understand that the easy part of being a Care Partner, are the things we do "to" the people we support, such as dressing, bathing, and eating ect. The hard part of what we do as Care Partners, is how we must "be" with all the emotions like sadness, anger, confusion, grief, loss and loneliness that comes from the loss of independence, and the powerless feeling they have over what is happening to them or any control of what is coming next.
For most of the people we support, this is their end of life journey. There is no process or procedure for supporting this part of the human experience, there is no guide that helps us to help someone else's heart from hurting. We not only want the pain to stop for them we want it to stop for us too, so we try to fix it, but we can't, so we are all left feeling mentally and emotionally vulnerable and raw.
Our orientation processes within our healthcare systems do little to nothing to arm our staff with the tools to support the human experience of our residents and families.
We put little to no value on this part of our staff's checklist, evidence by the fact we are having the hardest time in history keeping our staff.
I wonder what would change if we loved the ones we have, gave them the tools to simply be with people without feeling like they have to fix them, and worked to figure out what is in the way of our ability to connect instead of blaming someone or something for the inability to connect on a human level?
As leadership I know the systemic way of functioning for the last 100 years has been done by supporting from the top down and that soft skills and feeling were somehow dispensable, but I have to ask you now, are they?
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