As part of my wanderings through ICU I met a family who were there to support their very ill daughter. The daughter was asthmatic and was being ventilated after a severe attack. It was touch and go for quite a long time with this woman. The patient had three children of her own. Two of these children still needed looking after. The grandparents had come down from Wales and were staying in the daughters flat and looking after her children. They were both pensioners and were not getting any extra help in terms of money to help them in their plight. What they were finding difficult was the cost of travelling to and from the hospital. They had to come and go in order to meet the children from school and settle them and then return to the hospital. Their pensioner’s bus passes only worked in Wales and not in London. I said I’d see what I could do. It took me three weeks to sort out bus passes for them. It was like a head banging job. No-one wanted to take responsibility. It was maddening. If this couple had not come down to be with their daughter and take care of the grandchildren then social services would have had to look after the children. That would have cost a lot more than the price of a bus pass. In the end the hospital social workers paid for a weekly bus pass for the time that their daughter was a patient. This difficulty in getting through the bureaucracies of the system makes me wonder how many people slip through the net and don’t get their needs met. It’s extremely frustrating!
This patient was on a big roller coaster ride and several times it looked like she might die. She left ICU and went to HDU and came back to ICU again. Eventually she did leave the unit and went to a ward. My role with her then was to help her to live again. She had spent so long hovering between life and death that she now felt very insecure about living. She was even frightened to be out of bed.
I really enjoyed working with this family and getting the parents, especially the dad, to back off a bit and let their daughter live again. The patient eventually started to believe in herself. She knew she still had a long road of recovery ahead of her but she was beginning to think she could do it.
This woman came back to visit me several months later. It was amazing to see her. I nearly didn’t recognise her. She had put weight back on and looked really good. She told me that she took strength from my visits and that my faith in her even when she didn’t have faith in herself helped her get through what had been the worst experience she had ever had.
It was really good to get that feedback because so often as a chaplain you are working in a vacuum.
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