Tarah Dionne will never forget listening to an accomplished pianist play his last song.
Dionne, a registered nurse and the patient care coordinator at the Doug and Fran MacDonald Langley Hospice, choked up for a moment when she described how the man, a patient at the hospice residence, would play the piano at the facility over this past Christmas season, filling the space with beautiful music.
“While he was still well enough, he would play for us, and it was just the most moving, touching experience,” Dionne told the Langley Advance Times.
“As he was progressing in his disease, he knew that he couldn’t continue to play, so he played one last song for us, and it was very emotional for everybody.”
Dionne called the moment “something very, very special, and, you know, we felt very privileged that we got to experience that with him and his two family members that were there.”
It is an honour, and often an emotional experience, to work with patients in hospice, Dionne said.
“Palliative care, hospice care, has a comfort-based model, really focusing on the patient and their family and comfort. If you get to spend time with people, you get to learn really neat things about them,” Dionne explained.
“If patients are there for a while, we generally get the chance to get to know them pretty well. We’re trying to make their last days as comfortable and meaningful as possible.”
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Dionne, a Willowbrook resident, initially decided to pursue nursing because she wanted a career “where I felt like I was helping people, but I also wanted variety, and I didn’t want to get necessarily stuck or pigeonholed at a young age, because I originally had no idea what I wanted to do.”
She found the answer, early in her career, working in a medical palliative unit.
“Hospice has always kind of pulled at my heartstrings [ever since],” Dionne commented.
“I have experienced a lot of death in my personal life. I’ve probably experienced more than the average 39-year-old. All four of my grandparents [have passed]. I’ve lost aunts, I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost an ex. I’ve lost people to cancer, I’ve lost people to suicide.”
When Dionne looked into nursing, one attraction was the many different options within the profession, including many outside hospitals, operating rooms, intensive care units and ERs.
“Really, it just felt like endless opportunities.”
Such as: working in schools, correctional centres, addiction treatment facilities and psychiatric facilities, in occupational and public health positions, as educators, and as midwives.
Nurses can specialize in working with children, with adolescents, adults and the geriatric population, high acuity patients (acutely ill adults with multiple health challenges), people in rehab, and in medical daycare.
“You can work at home with people doing home care, you can work in long-term care, you can work from home on the phone, you can work in a community setting like a hospice,” Dionne added.
Because there weren’t many openings for palliative care nurses when she was starting out, Dionne “veered” into internal medicine for several years before finding her back to hospice care, and said that experience has proven to be valuable in her hospice work.
Her specialty tends to be a lifetime commitment, she has noticed.
“People that find their way into hospice palliative care, if it’s their true niche, they tend to stay there and they don’t leave until they retire.”
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