Hi folks, Dan here. Just a quick heads up before we begin, as you might expect from the episode

title, there is a lot of discussion of death in this episode. Some of it can get pretty intense,

so use your discretion if you have young people listening with you. Heather Myrand was a hospice

nurse for just over 30 years. She retired in 2021. One of the first things she did when she met with a new patient in their home was to figure out how well they understood the situation they were in.

I should ask, you know, what has a doctor told you that will give me a sense of where their head is?

There are some patients who have not been given the whole story, or some patients are in denial,

or they hear what they want to hear. In other cases, they will say, well, the doctor told me

there's nothing more that can be done.

So go home and be comfortable.

So there's sometimes a tension between what the patient knows and what the family knows.

And that leaves the hospice nurse in a difficult situation.

Heather once took care of a Russian man in his 50s. He was dying of cancer, but his wife... She didn't want us to speak the word

cancer. We couldn't even say the word cancer in his presence. And so there was this hovering,

this sense of, okay, I'm just going to sit here

and, you know, make sure that you're not saying anything that you...

Make sure to censor anything that comes out of your mouth, right? Exactly. And then you always

feel like you're on guard, you know, not able to address certain things or even the folder

that says hospice on it, you have to hide

it someplace or cover that word. The philosophy of hospice is to not be secretive, not to withhold

information. So it's sort of a tricky situation because we want to respect the family member, but also at the same time, that patient has a right to know what's going on with their body and why are they feeling this way and why am I not getting better.

So in some cases, there are lots of obstacles to getting to the patient emotionally to begin to prepare them for what's coming ahead.

The I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, an Olympic

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