Do the impossible

Pari was one of those friends that embrace you with their care and tenderness.  She was full of a radiant laughter and good humour.  It encompassed all who came into her circle and she allowed it to embrace everyone she came across.  As if to say, you are worthy of my love, whoever you are!  I met her at a strange time in her life when she went back to being a student after years of working as a District nurse in a rural community.  She sweated blood over those first assignments at university but, after discovering her brain had not atrophied in the proceeding decades, she took to the course and university with delight. 

She told me of a client, Suzy in England who she visited in her role as district nurse.  This woman was in the terminal stages of cancer and required increasing doses of palliative medicine to keep the pain at bay.  It was Pari's job to make sure her passing was as pain free as possible.  Pari said she remembered thinking that endings are always hard but no one should face them alone.  It requires courage to live and to die, especially while everyone around you is living and you are facing death. Suzy had it in spades and was resigned to her life ending.  Medical treatments had been applied and endured to no avail.  So instead she was planning her departure and with two young children and a husband there was a lot to think about.  Towards the end she was moved into a special unit in the local hospital.  It was thought easier to give regular pain medication and for the family a valuable break from heart breaking 24 hour care.

Pari also visited her in hospital.  The health service has now forgotten such continuity of care is vital.  Having the same district nurse who has watched your journey from health to illness and held your hand during chemotherapy, hope, radiotherapy, hairlessness and final acceptance that no more can be done is a comfort.  Not some new stranger who knows only this sad end game of your life.  Pari watched the disease’s progression with growing realization that the end was very close.  An intense weariness and sleepiness in Suzy became ever present.  There was no more fight in her left, just a desire for the whole thing to be over.  Then, disaster happened.  As Pari said, you cannot imagine anything this bad getting worse but it did.

Her husband decided he could not take anymore of death and illness and loss.  He arranged for the two children to be put into social care and left.  When the news was broken to Suzy of her husband leaving and her children being placed into social care, it was whispered gradually to avoid traumatising her.  Once, the message had been given Pari watched as her sick friend stirred as if from a deathly stillness.  Her face became mobile, her arm movements more deliberate.  The transformation continued throughout the day and it ended with her discharging herself, against all advice, while arranging her children to be taken out of care and back to the family home.  As Pari visited, Suzy literally dragged herself from the sofa to the sink making huge vegetable/fruit drinks in a blender.  She managed the children and when they slept she would weep on the large sofa and rage against her illness.  Pari had never seen such true grit.  There was a steely determination to persevere, to beat this thing.  Incredibly, Suzy did.  She lived a further eight years, long enough to start her own successful restaurant in the local village and bring all her children into young independent teenagers.  For Pari it was a constant reminder that we know so little of the unbelievable reserves people have within them.  Of how the mind, once set on a path, can indeed do the impossible.