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I work for a company that arranges community nursing but I also do other things like forwarding messages onto the other teams in our company. I personally work for the nursing team and have done for almost two years now.
About six months ago, I had a call amd I recognised the surname. We had had a message come through about a community nursing patient passing away (female) with that surname a few days prior so it briefly popped into my head as I took this gentleman’s details and accessed his record (unusual name). He explained he would usually phone his diabetic nurse every week to pass across his blood glucose readings (SOP for the diabetes service here), but he had been looking after his terminally ill wife for the last few weeks so had not been on top of his readings lately. This is where I put two and two together and realised the message we’d received must have been for his wife. He confirmed he’d lost her several days beforehand. I offered my sincere condolences. He was very surprised at this and at how I was aware of his wife but I explained that I had been part of the team helping to look after her, and he thanked me for all my help with her the past few weeks (I don’t do the visits, but I receive the calls and arrange them with the nurses).
We were busy that morning but I made sure to take some time just to talk to him, and he told me how it happened. He told me how she slipped away while he was making them tea, how he held her still warm body for a while because he didn’t want to make it real. He told me how she was full of fire and personality, and they had met at a fancy dress party 46 years earlier. He was worried about money for the funeral, and I reassured him that we had a graveside service for my grandmother which had been beautiful, and that a service didn’t have to be big to be meaningful, it just had to have the right people there. We talked for about twenty minutes, and he left the call feeling better about the situation and thanking me.
I’m about to leave the community nursing team for a promotion over to a different team, where it’ll be more appointment booking and less of the emergency stuff, so I guess I just wanted to share one of the most impactful calls I’ve ever had. I’m crying buckets writing this honestly. It was so raw and still is. This job has been the best amd worst two years of my life to be honest. I’ll miss it in a way. I’ll miss these types of calls where you really get to connect with the caller.
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