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Mary Lane Listens Between the Lines
Originally published in Chicago Hospital News, October 2005
by Margi Carlson, R.N.
Mary Lane calls it “empathic listening.” It’s what she does to be in tune with a dying patient’s needs. “You take yourself out of the personal aspects of the case, you devote the time and let the patient do the talking. Then you listen to the family, too,” says this nursing home social worker, who has served terminally ill patients for the Chicagoland South program of VITAS Innovative Hospice Care® for four years.
Lane leaves the medical care of the terminally ill to the doctors and nurses. She leaves their spiritual care to the chaplains. She fills the emotional gaps in between. “You have life as long as you have breath,” Lane says. “These patients know they are going to die. They still want to feel good about themselves—and we want them to feel good.”
Lane offers an example: the nursing home resident whose nurse’s aide combed her hair and then held up a mirror for the patient’s approval. “She just cried,” reports Lane. “She hadn’t realized all the dye was gone from her hair. She insisted the color was supposed to be ‘graham cracker.’”
Lane turned to the VITAS Foundation for End-of-Life Care to request “a grant for a new hair-do.” She received $80, enough to pay for four applications of “graham cracker” hair coloring. “Now when she looks in the mirror, she grins from ear to ear,” reports Lane.
Sometimes Lane meets the needs of the patient’s family as well—even when there isn’t a close relative. She recalls the nursing home resident who was estranged from family and had lived in the facility for five years. He was referred to VITAS so late in his disease that he died before Lane could even get to his bedside to assess his needs. But when the morgue asked Lane about plans for a funeral, she knew the nursing home residents and staff needed to mourn him.
So Lane arranged for a van to pick up residents, along with all their crutches and walkers, and take them to the funeral. “We all cried,” says Lane. “His VITAS team and his neighbors became his family, and everything turned out swell.”
And then there was the withdrawn patient who would speak only a word or two. Lane learned through the family that her patient liked music and had worked as Hugh Hefner’s maid in the Playboy Mansion.
When music therapy was introduced by VITAS to the nursing home, Lane included her withdrawn patient. Nine patients were brought together in a large room, given maraca-like shakers and encouraged to play along to some lively jazz.
Lane’s patient “turned into someone we’d never seen before!” she recalls. She sang, she laughed, she shouted, she talked. “It brought her alive, reminded her of the Playboy Club,” says Lane. “She said it was the happiest she had been in a long time.”
Mary Lane has a reputation among her teammates as a social worker who makes things happen. The Chicagoland South program has named her Social Worker of the Year twice for her efforts. But for Lane it’s a labor of love. “At this stage of my life,” she says, “I can appreciate this work. To me, it’s instant gratification.”
(Margi Carlson, General Manager, VITAS Innovative Hospice Care ® of Chicagoland South, can be reached at 708-748-8777)
100 South Biscayne Blvd, Suite 1500 Miami, FL
33131 (305) 374-4143 |
