Hospice’s silent saints bring hope
After an inexcusable delay I registered with Hospice East Rand and one of their ‘Silent Saints’, Sister Tracy Scholefield, was appointed to care for my wife until her dying day.
EDITOR – “They do a good job but I don’t need them”. Probably 99 per cent of people have this attitude towards the Hospice. It was my attitude too until cancer came calling nine months ago when my late wife was diagnosed with stage-four liver and lung cancer.
After an inexcusable delay, I registered with Hospice East Rand and one of their silent saints, Sister Tracy Scholefield, was appointed to care for my wife until her last day. Tracy became a precious family friend and soon the title ‘Sister’ disappeared and Tracy became the norm.
As a sixty-seven-year-old war veteran, I had no idea what I was to face. The cancer started slowly, eating away at my wife`s organs. At first, we thought we could handle the pain with massages and the odd prescribed medicines. My wife went on one bout of chemo and it devastated her.
She had bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, the inevitable hair loss came with the relevant emotional trauma. She weighed up her options and stopped chemo. Her mind and body returned to normal albeit for a while anyway.
Trips to our local doctor, while beneficial, were costly and the resident Hospice doctor wrote out the needed scripts and Tracy very kindly arranged with our pharmacist to prepare them for us.
All the while the pain increased and Tracy visited weekly at first but then more frequently. As a pensioner, I was at home to nurse my wife and Tracy continually instructed me on procedures and dosages of the medicine. I came to see in her an abiding passion for care for her patient.
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Many years of experience helped her to see pain and discomfort in my wife even in the last hours of her life while in a coma. When my wife could not walk anymore we rented a wheelchair from Hospice for only an R100 a month and during the last few days an oxygen machine.
A great deal of equipment is available for rental and wisdom dictates that given the terminal nature of the illness, buying expensive items is foolhardy. As the end drew near, Tracy fed me with just enough information to prepare me for the next days and eventually handed me a document clearly preparing me for everything.
A normal visit was about an hour but on the day my wife died Tracy stayed for four hours ‘reading’ all the signs. It never ended there and at midnight I made the call she wanted me to make. She returned a few days later just to see how my son and I were coping. The truth of the matter is you will need Hospice in the future.
You value your loved ones, friends and relatives and by supporting Hospice you are investing love and compassion in the Hospice bank for that day that I pray to God you will never face.
I greatly thank and appreciate Hospice and especially Tracy for these last six months of my wife`s time on earth.
Pastor Bill Steyn.
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