Going out with a bang, not a whimper

Last night I worked my final shift at Peter Mac Cancer Centre.

On the last day of my official CPE unit, I took in a goodbye card and box of chocolates for the staff on the ward where I had been working, and then proceeded to do a Dame Nellie, and kept coming back after the farewell, for a few casual shifts.

Well, this time it's final. I have handed in my hospital ID and pager, and said my final farewells to the staff of the Pastoral Care Dept. And to mark the auspicious occasion of my final shift, I was treated to a rather busy night.

Firstly, my usual hospital round was quite busy, and by the time I had visited all the patients referred to me by the nursing staff, it was after 7:30. On a normal shift, the ward round would be well and truly finished, with reports written and stats entered by then, ready to head home at 8pm, to be on call for the rest of the night. But such an easy ride was not to be.

After an exhausting round, spending time with a number of patients coming to terms with the shock of new diagnoses and adjusting to the reality that they had cancer, I headed back to the department, made a coffee, heated up my dinner and started writing my handover report for the next day.

When about halfway through the report, an emergency code was sounded over the PA, and I had to trek back to the ward to attend. During the next two hours I spent a chunk of time providing support to the other patients in the room, whilst the medical team were working on the patient who was the subject of the emergency, and then the patient's partner arrived, after being called into the hospital. I ended up spending almost an hour with her, providing support as she articulated some of her fears for her husband.

Even though, during the course of my time at Peter Mac, I have provided support to a number of families in similar situations, where a patient might be dying or in medical crisis, I still have trouble knowing what to say to someone when they look at me with such fear and desolation in their eyes as this woman had last night. I can't remember much of what I said to her, but would like to think that my calm, gentle presence was helpful to her in facing that difficult time.

When considering last night, the irony was not lost on me that I seem to have finished how I started, with an emergency (I also had an emergency code on my very first evening/on-call shift in the first week of my CPE unit), so there's a kind of symmetry about it really (and to be honest, when the code was called, I wasn't really surprised. I think I was kind of expecting it). Fortunately, though, on this occasion, the patient was still alive the next day, which has to be a good thing.