Well, not really a heavyweight. Maybe 140 pounds at peak, and probably about 100 pounds when the end came. But a heavyweight, nonetheless.
Most people live and die with lives lived anonymously except for family, friends, colleagues, and people touched. At the end, what matters is whether they mattered. And everyone matters.
Recently, a remarkable human being known and loved by those who knew her died in hospice. I went to visit her the morning after I heard she was admitted, but she had died the evening before. She was 88 years young when she left. She was not family or a prior patient, but a friend and colleague, and someone who was respected and loved by those with whom she worked. And Nona Ruth Meyers mattered.
Life is reflected by not only by what one does, but what others say about you when you’re not around. She will be remembered not just by her personal connections, but by the hundreds of patients she cared for as a critical care nurse at Los Robles Hospital decades ago, during an era in healthcare that I fear is irretrievably lost. It was a time when healthcare was not measured in dollars and sterile metrics. It was a time when the human touch was still an integral part of bedside care, as well as the care of the patient’s family when hope was all one had left after all that medical science had done that it could do.
In my five decades of being a physician, and over 30 years of those in critical care, I have had the privilege of working with many excellent healthcare professionals, often in difficult situations. We are fortunate that in this country the standards are high for quality of care. But the quality of caring at the bedside is an intangible that is difficult to measure. It is sensed by humans as being warm, listening, and expressing verbal and nonverbal cues. The result is trust. They don’t, and they can’t, teach that in professional schools. It comes from how one was raised and the innate characteristics with which one is born. And it needs to be nurtured for it to thrive and persist. Otherwise, it can burn out and be difficult to rekindle.
We come and go in this short time on Earth with barely a whisper when we leave. But what we do when we are here matters, and making the world better, even if it’s the tiny corner of it in which one inhabits, is important.
It is not how much money one accumulates or the accolades one accrues. Did you make people’s lives better, ease their pain and suffering, provide hope, give them more time to be with those they cared for, and quality time for themselves? That’s what a caregiver is. Nursing at that level is being an evidence-based caregiver doing all that the medical team can provide. But there also is the humanitarian component, the intangible part of truly caring for the individual, like their skin care, moistening of their lips, administering eye drops, making sure the patient is as comfortable as the patient can be. Some of that can be taught. But much of that cannot and must come from who the nurse is as a human being. Nona was exceptional in the former but perhaps is most fondly remembered by those who worked with her for the latter.
A heavyweight indeed. As my sister-in-law, one of Nona’s colleagues, commented to me, Nona was the best of the best. Godspeed Nona.
Irving Kent Loh, M.D., is a preventive cardiologist and the director of the Ventura Heart Institute in Thousand Oaks. Email him at drloh@venturaheart.com.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Requiem for a heavyweight | Dr. Loh
Reporting by Dr. Irving Kent Loh, Second Opinion / Ventura County Star
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