 Welcome to Senior Connections, the monthly senior program on community television put on by the Sheboygan Senior Activity Center on Wisconsin Avenue at 4th Street. The Senior Activity Center is funded by the City of Sheboygan and by the Friends of the Senior Center and this is a monthly program that we've had for a number of years now that discuss senior topics, seniors themselves, issues that we feel need to be brought to the community like our topic today is hospice, hospice care and death and dying issues and our guest for the first time ever is someone well known to me Nancy Simmons from Sharon Richardson Hospice in Sheboygan Falls. Hi Nancy and welcome to our program. Nice to see you again. Nice to see you after all these years. All these years that's right. So we're going to make believe like we're introducing you to people for the first time although many people know who you are. Could you tell us what your actual title is and what you do at Sharon Richardson Hospice? My title is Chaplain and Bereavement Coordinator. When I came to Sharon Richardson in August of 2007 I was hired as the chaplain kind of interesting because I came there as a result of a restructuring of a job at Sheboygan Memorial and I was out of work and I was looking for another position and I had been a volunteer manager at Sheboygan Memorial so there was a volunteer position available at Sharon Richardson and when I went to interview for that position they saw that I had a degree in theology and they told me that they liked the way that I talked about how to deal with people so they offered me the position of chaplain and I had that position for three years and then in 2010 the position of Bereavement Coordinator was added to my position when again there was a restructuring in that position out at Sharon Richardson. There's a lot of changes going on in healthcare all the time everywhere so where I am is really the result of several changes in healthcare positions and structures. Several fortuitous changes. I'm always interested in people's backgrounds and I understand that you had some background graduate background in well in this field before you even hired so I find that fascinating could you tell us a little bit about that I mean graduate degrees are not cheap. I got my graduate degree from St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee Roman Catholic Seminary and that's my background is Roman Catholic I must say that the seminary experience was probably one of the best experiences in my life and one of the things about that kind of a school a graduate school is that you're always looking at how things apply to people's life it was a school of pastoral theology it's not just the theoretical theology it's like how does this make a difference in people's lives and so I had that background but then when I graduated I couldn't really find a position that made sense to me that was a calling to me in the Catholic Church so I did other things for quite a while and then quite to my surprise when I came to Sharon Richardson and interviewed I was surprised to actually get the offer to be a chaplain it's probably what I was meant to do but it took me a long time to get there so for people who wonder if they're ever going to get to their goal in life or if they can't figure out what it is sometimes it just takes a long time to get there. Yes because I knew you from your former job working as a volunteer coordinator at Memorial Hospital in Sheboygan and you and actually two other women were coordinating one of the best caregiver support groups I had ever been in and you really kept my head above water for four or five years before I think all of you just maybe got burned out or tired and changed again for them you know that caregivers group probably started in about the mid 90s something like that and it was the result of some interest that was expressed through the women's health area in at Sheboygan Memorial and I was responsible for that area for a while also and so we what about eight years I think we had a monthly support group where people could come and talk and share and also learn some things about being a caregiver I think we were one of the first if not the first caregiver support group in the area I then also did some training for powerful tools for caregiving which I know is something that is offered regularly through the aging and disability resource center to help caregivers better take care of themselves and speak up for themselves because oftentimes caregivers are people who end up taking so much care of others that they forget to take care of themselves. Yes so now we're caught up and back at Sharon Richardson how long has Sharon Richardson been in existence and tell us could you describe your day-to-day job what a typical day is for you as a chaplain and bereavement specialist. I think some of the preparatory work for Sharon Richardson got started in about 2005 when there was a lot of fundraising and planning and things like that that went on the actual hiring of staff for a for the program began in February of 2007 when we hired home team people I was hired in August of 2007 and then in September of 2007 we opened this center it took a while to raise all that money and then to actually do the building of the of the center my day I tell people my days are full but they're not planned necessarily because it's an awful lot of responding to what the needs are now depending upon what the patients condition and the family members conditions how they may have changed particularly the those patients and families who are in the center I also provide care for the home team patients and their family members and the idea of providing care not only for the patient but for the family members it's something that's very specific to hospice not just Sharon Richardson hospice but all hospices that's our responsibility we look out for the family members as well during the time that the patient is in our care but then afterward we look out for the family members in the bereavement program and so it was kind of a natural continuity if you will to add that position to the chaplain position so my days will be spent visiting with patients visiting with family members an awful lot of sitting and listening to people talk encouraging people to talk but what's important to them what they're concerned about and trying to help them to feel at ease with what's going on we also do an awful lot of education because quite frankly we in our culture don't know much about the whole dying process and so we try to share information with family members and with patients so that they understand what's going on they understand what they might expect so that there's less fear because they know what's going on so we do a lot of that kind of thing in terms of the bereavement program I am on the phone with people a lot talking with them about where they are in terms of dealing with their grief and how they might better deal with their grief I also facilitate a couple of grief support groups for people and I will meet with people one-on-one to talk with them if they're having a difficult time dealing with grief to try to help them to move through that process and feel comfortable with it and to recognize that grief is unique to everybody and when people are telling you what the answers are for you that's not necessarily the case everybody has to respond to their own needs for for grief and dealing with their grief it sounds like your day is multi-focus multi-task multi-everything so now I'm just going to ask you when does the chaplain find time for heroin self-care well you know one of the things about the kind of work that we do any of us who work in hospice we really need to look out for those kinds of things to take care of ourselves and sometimes we don't do that very well just like a lot of other people one of the things that I do is I have particularly recently in the last according to the last year made arrangements to see a spiritual director a person who I go and talk with and share where I'm at and what kinds of things are causing concern or stress or question in my life and that is a very healthy kind of thing to do I also think that as a person who's trying to encourage other people to talk to me I need to be a person who is willing to share and be open to other people as well so it's it's good to kind of be on the other side if you will and having to trust and build a trusting relationship with someone else that's one of the healthiest things you know the other things is there are some other things like journaling or now that it's nice outside to get outside to go for walks I'm hoping that my garden might be better this year also than it was last year so I do some of those kinds of things as well as trying to be with friends you're in such a beautiful setting for all of this when I was at Sharon Richardson again in Sheboygan Falls last week when we talked during the pre-interview some of the flowers were coming up the herbs were coming up in the kitchen garden I think I just shared with you I could easily go there and spend several hours every week without having a friend or family member there maybe we need to discuss for a while what does hospice actually mean and how are patients admitted into hospice I think there's an awful lot of misinformation or lack of information about what hospice is especially with the center a lot of times I think people feel that they have to wait until the very end until they're almost a death's door and then come to the hospice center hospice we hospice is in both the home or a nursing home for example a facility or at our hospice center what in order to get into hospice really the qualifying kind of situation is that a person must have a terminal diagnosis a diagnosis where the doctor says that under normal circumstances the expectation is that you will have six months or less to live that's really the the qualifying the qualifying item to get into hospice it can be a whole lot of things we have any number of cancer patients we have people with heart issues we have people with COPD we have people especially the elderly who have problems with kind of an overall problem called debility where they're just they're losing weight they're not eating they're not able to get around they're kind of shutting down if you will but one of the the problems with hospice is people I think wait too long and part of it might be because they're afraid if I go to hospice then I give up there's nothing that can be done for me and in a sense I mean it's really true that we can't do anything to try to treat them to make their condition better or to prolong their lives but we can do a lot of things to help them to have a good life for the last part of their life so we do all kinds of interesting things and there's special things especially at the center we've had a number of patients and I'm reminded of this now as the sun is out in its spring who the doors on the patios to the rooms at the hospice center open up so that you can roll the patient's bed out and we've had a number of patients who will be out on the patio and they will die as the sun is coming up with the sun shining on their face and for people who have been farmers or people who have been outdoors people a lot it's meaningful to them and to their family members that they are able to die in that kind of a setting that's a really special kind of thing for for patients but we've done other kinds of things I remember one of actually one of the volunteers at memorial who was a patient at Sharon Richardson always wanted to ride in a red Volkswagen with the top down and people found out about that and they arranged with a Volkswagen club to pick her up and drive her from her home to the hospice center that was covered in the newspaper around here so I think people might remember that kind of thing but we try to find out what's meaningful to people and help them to accomplish some of those things even in the time that they have left so that that yes we can't do anything to try to treat your illness to help you live longer but we can do an awful lot to make this a good quality time for you and time for the family with you as well you know I remember when my mother was in a local nursing home where she'd been for four and a half years and I had taken her taken care of her in her own home for a considerable amount of time and she was 96 and seemed to survive everything and so when it finally came I had no idea that actually she was dying I just had thought she would probably outlive me so she was being treated although she was off all meds and doing fine and one day it was an LPN at a local nursing home that said to me Rita have you thought about hospice I couldn't believe I had not thought about it because I'd also trained as a hospice volunteer earlier so when hospice came on and it was Sharon Richardson the last three days of my mother's life after the intake interview was over I just felt like the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders for her care and her monitoring and her advocacy and I finally felt Nancy that I could just be a daughter and a witness to her last and it was wonderful so with the deepest gratitude I think this is such a valuable asset in our community that's one of the things that we tell people often and particularly in regard to them considering moving to the hospice center your mother was in a facility so she was getting nursing care there already but knowing that more that you knew because of what we were able to share about the process and things like that helped you to be at ease with the situation we want family members to be able to be family members to say those last things that they need to say to have those conversations to whisper messages of love and care and concern to hold the patient's hand and not be worried about did I give them the right pill at the right time did I turn them often enough am I dealing with a nausea and other kinds of things all of those kinds of concerns that really you're not trained for because you're not a medical person so that really is one of the blessings of hospice I think both for the patient and for the family members one of the interesting things that I've talked about with folks is there's this interesting dynamic going on oftentimes when people are sick with a serious illness the patient feels like they have to keep on trying to get treatment because they don't want to let the family down the family feels like they have to keep on encouraging the patient to get treatment because they don't want to let the patient down but nobody talks about the fact that really what we really want is some decent quality of life so someone's got to bring up that topic whether it's their doctor or someone maybe a friend who knows them or a conversation that you may have had a church we've showed the dvd consider the conversation in a lot of places and that's really about talking about how to get that beginning conversation going so that people know that we're not just giving up and kind of tossing you out but that we're making a choice to encourage you to have a good quality of life at the end of life. Do you have patients and their families when they're referred to hospice and come in that are that are well what do you do if they're resistant to the death and dying issues and and let's say put up some fight or resistance to what's your what you're offering or is that long past no it's not long past because sometimes people's will come to us shortly after they get the diagnosis or not so much the diagnosis but when the doctor says we can't do any more treatment for you in regard to your disease and and would you should encourage or you should think about hospice and sometimes people are just so overwhelmed because they have focused so much on the idea of we're fighting this we're fighting this we're fighting this and then all of a sudden kind of on a dime it's like I need to think a different way so we just try to be patient we try to share with people what's going on we try to listen to what they're saying and what their concerns are to see if there are some things that they need to tend to either the patient or the family member before things get too late and we try to encourage people to make good memories even then in the last days or weeks that they're that they're with us whether it's in the hospice center or in their home could you tell us a bit about your grief support group cup of hope we've had a grief support group with the hospice center ever since we had a center it's the fourth Wednesday of the month from 10 30 to noon it's available not only for people who have had family members die in our care but anyone who's had the the loss through death of a family member or friend that one has been going on essentially for six years we added about three years ago one in the evening on the third Thursday of the month which would be like this Thursday tomorrow night from six until seven thirty because there were people who were working who also had had losses of loved ones and didn't have a chance to share their story and really what grief support groups do is allow people to tell their story part of healing from grief is being able to talk about what has happened to talk about the illness the death of their loved one talk about what impact it's had on me as a person who might be grieving and in the process of telling kind of the same story over and over there is eventually some kind of a release so that people don't feel so caught up by that grief in that sense of loss what happens unfortunately is that sometimes in fact a lot of the times other people may hear it once or twice and it's like okay i've heard that before i don't want to hear it again so the person who's grieving doesn't really have a place to share that with and that's why the grief support group is good the other thing is that you see other people who have gone through the grief process and they are further along and you think i've been there i think they got ahead i can get ahead as well so you kind of learn from one another as well as it's you really um meets the need of having to tell your story you know i think when my mother passed in a local nursing home um i knew that i wanted a service right then and there um and we were involved with you with your hospice so uh the nurse called you up and you came and my current caregiver support group uh facilitator from woof and social services came and we had a service right there at her bedside with her still in the bed uh which was so beautiful to me and then i started attending your grief support group and i remembered as a big group 15 or 20 people what i loved is maybe half were men and the men were very verbal and crying and sharing their emotions and so i've decided that you know what i need to do that once a year to commemorate my mother is just coming back to that your cup of hope support group so i hope to see you in may um we're coming to the close of the 30 minutes um is there something maybe that you can think of that you would like to mention like uh first of all what does somebody do if they just want to investigate this without committing who do they call call kim pittner at the hospice center she is the person who um does referrals and that's really the term that we use for people getting admitted to hospice she will do do tours for people um at our hospice center but she can also talk about hospice and hospice services in the home as well she does referrals for the home as well um and she can connect you up with the correct people who might be able to answer questions or things like that um i think it's good for people to investigate it ahead of time actually if you can um there's such a stigma about the whole process of death and dying in our culture and really it can it's a pretty powerful experience people have said to us who work in hospice why how can you work in hospice it must be so depressing clearly there's a sense of loss about a lot of things and and the sadness over deaths of people but it is such an empowering kind of experience for the patients for the family members and also for the staff people are just so open and so honest with us and we are with people at a singular time in their life we all only get to die once um so to be able to be with people uh when you kind of cut to the chase and deal with what's important in life that's a remarkable um event um as well as sometimes the coming together of families the sharing of families the expressions of family the expressions of love that you see are really pretty remarkable um and overall the one other thing i guess i want to say before i did hospice work i the only death i had been a part of was my dad's death when he died at home it with hospice care from another agency and he just took his last breath of the nearly i guess thousand or so patients thousand or twelve hundred that we've had maybe a little more um i've not been around all of those deaths but i've been at a lot of those deaths or near or known about them almost every one of them was a peaceful death a peaceful death what we might want where the pain is controlled um being one of the most important things they aren't struggling for breath or anything like that their symptoms are controlled and really in a time when health care can keep people alive with debilitating conditions that often are very stressful to be able to come to death and have a peaceful death is a really important kind of thing to accomplish and i'm real proud of what our team has done both for their patients and for their family members and for the community now this is we're at the end of our 30 minutes believe it or not this is a question this is a surprise question i feel that we've barely covered everything that could be covered including what you've alluded to how our culture views death and dying issues and our avoidance perhaps many times i'd like to talk to you about spirituality versus religious um um is there what about the patient who's referred that fears being proselytized in the last day of their lives all of those issues we don't have time to cover right now so i'd like to invite you to come back another time i'd be happy to thank you so much and just to wrap up then with our final concluding minutes you've been listening to senior connections which is filmed at the university of wisconsin shabuigan campus we are a program of by and for seniors our guests our interviewers our camera people are all seniors we try to move beyond the stereotype of what being a senior is and we consider anybody over 50 to be eligible to be our guest so we are on three times a week monday thursdays and fridays on cable television on both charter and at and t you can find out by looking in our monthly newsletter the exact times one thing i do want to mention is that most of our programs from the last several years are available on the internet if you go to www dot shabuigan senior center dot com and you can just stroll through the different topics and people we've interviewed if you want to catch any back programs so thank you for listening please stay with us and good night oh dad wait till you see the bike we got hearing loss happens gradually with age making it easy to ignore yet most older americans aren't getting their hearing tested untreated hearing loss can keep your loved ones from enjoying what they cherish most dad can you hear me don't let that happen speak up about hearing loss you'll be glad you did hey hi what's your name you live around here you're pretty where are you guys going we're young we're young this is about time to get you fixed sweetie your pets will start getting noticed sooner than you think accidental leaders need to millions killed in shelters each year help prevent more fix at month four