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As Nurse Lay Dying, Offering Herself as Instruction in Caring
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/fatally-ill-and-making-herself-the-lesson.html?pagewanted=2&smid=tw-shareSOUTH HADLEY, Mass. It was early November when Martha Keochareon called the nursing school at Holyoke Community College, her alma mater. She had a proposal, which she laid out in a voice mail message.
I have cancer, she said after introducing herself, and Im wondering if youll need somebody to do a case study on, a hospice patient.
Perhaps some nursing students just want to feel what a tumor feels like, she went on. Or they could learn something about hospice care, which aims to help terminally ill people die comfortably at home.
Maybe youll have some ambitious student that wants to do a project, Ms. Keochareon (pronounced CATCH-uron) said after leaving her phone number. Thank you. Bye.
Kelly Keane, a counselor at the college who received the message, was instantly intrigued. Holyokes nursing students, like most, learn about cancer from textbooks. They get some experience with acutely ill patients during a rotation on the medical-surgical floor of a hospital. They practice their skills in the colleges simulation lab on sophisticated mannequins that can die of cancer, heart attacks and other ailments. But Ms. Keochareon, 59, a 1993 graduate of Holyokes nursing program, was offering students something unique: an opportunity not only to examine her, but to ask anything they wanted about her experience with cancer and dying
This is a very inspirational story of a nurse, on her death bed, who made a difference in the lives of her students and countless other people with her courage in the face of certain death.
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As Nurse Lay Dying, Offering Herself as Instruction in Caring (Original Post)
blueclown
Jan 2013
OP
Pachamama
(16,887 posts)1. Wow....that made me cry....
What a gift she was able to give them in her dying - and them in their living....
blueclown
(1,869 posts)2. A very selfless woman
Its very touching indeed.
jgyjadsgf
(8 posts)3. Spam deleted by Behind the Aegis (MIR Team)