Sharing Stories: Cancer and End-of-Life Care

In HFA's upcoming teleconference, you'll meet a variety of people dealing with cancer and end-of-life care. Below are excerpts from three individuals - two professionals who encounter cancer on a daily basis, and a daughter who describes her family's experience following her mother's cancer diagnosis. Their lives and stories are extraordinary and give you an idea of the depth of this year's March 24 program.

Shelda Smith is a medical social worker with Calvary Hospital and Hospice in Bronx, NY. She talks about the emotional components of her work.

Being hospice clinicians, [we] carry the grief of a lot of whole families on our shoulders. And one of the most difficult things is balancing that emotional piece of working with those families with your own personal life and your own sense of well-being. The toughest cases for me have been the cases where I've met women who are about my age and have children about the age of my children. And it certainly mirrors my own mortality. I feel vulnerable and that's difficult. It's often very difficult to... think you're invincible with this job. We enter into somebody's emotional world and we come out of it feeling a lot of those emotions. I try to put myself in a place where I do feel it, and I could empathize with it, and I don't run away from it. I think it's important even for patients to know that you're there, that you are where they are and they can sense it. And for me, I think it's probably my best skill -- being able to be where patients are, and really letting them know that I understand what they're going through. But then you have to find a way to come out of that house and be able to leave that behind.

Jennifer Alkhayat is a nurse practitioner with Capital Palliative Care Consultants, which is based in Northern Virginia and affiliated with Capital Hospice.

Capital Hospice had a great medical team and realized that there was a huge part of the population that was not being able to benefit from the hospice services, but could still benefit from the knowledge and education that all of our medical professionals had. So we thought it would be a good idea to get out and into the community, and be able to offer these services to those who were not quite ready for hospice yet. The types of patients that we see are generally patients with life-limiting illness, who have symptoms that may be out of control while they are pursuing other types of aggressive treatments, whether that be chemotherapy, dialysis, any of those things. When you have a disease like this, they usually go hand in hand with symptoms -- you're usually not well-managed at that point, because a lot of times people think that this is part of the illness, and they need to go through that part. What we try to do is educate them, let them know that they don't have to suffer, that they can continue to get the treatment that they want to pursue, but at the same time have the quality of life that they would like to live. The type of symptoms that Capital Palliative Care assists in managing are pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, anxiety, constipation, diarrhea, any -- any adverse effects that you may be getting from aggressive treatment or from the disease itself.

The special role that we have is, especially when Capital Palliative Care gets involved early in someone's cancer diagnosis, is being able to take that journey with them, to make sure that they are comfortable, to make sure that they have the energy, to make sure that they have the support to continue with these treatments that can be quite burdensome to many people. Many people really hold on to these treatments as kind of their lifeline, and don't want to let go.

Sherry Meyers of Great Falls, VA, is one of three siblings and talks about her mother's cancer diagnosis and her family's experience with hospice care.

We learned about mom having lung cancer five years ago, so that would be 2005. It was St. Patrick's Day. It was very unexpected, although she was a smoker for a number of years. We weren't shocked that she had lung cancer, but were surprised that it had taken so long to catch up to her. So we were advised by her general practitioner to see a series of oncologists and to bring in hospice right away because she was 83 at the time. So we had no idea how long she would live or how far it had progressed. I am the youngest of three children, but I am kind of the main caregiver of my family, and so I was the one that had to contact the hospice and brought them in soon after she was diagnosed.

[Mom] was very apprehensive about it at the beginning because she thought if I have hospice, then I'm going to die tomorrow, which was what a lot of my brother was focusing on. She eventually came to accept it and she lived for a year and a half with the lung cancer, so we were involved with hospice for a year and a half. [Hospice] was absolutely incredible. We had a very good experience with them. When they first came with us, the hospice nurse and social worker took us through all that they would be doing. My sister was very for it. My brother, as I said, was a little apprehensive in the beginning, just because he thought it was too soon to bring hospice in. He realized shortly thereafter that it was a great decision because they brought a calming influence to a very difficult situation.