{"id":51431,"date":"2020-01-29T08:26:28","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T13:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/?p=51431"},"modified":"2020-09-21T17:31:59","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T21:31:59","slug":"volunteer-pens-a-touching-tribute-to-a-feisty-patient-and-the-nurses-who-cared-for-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/healthy-tomorrows\/volunteer-pens-a-touching-tribute-to-a-feisty-patient-and-the-nurses-who-cared-for-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteer pens a touching tribute to a \u201cfeisty\u201d patient and the nurses who cared for him"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Volunteer Rakesh Misra became friends with a sometimes \u201cfeisty\u201d patient and watched as a team of compassionate nurses gently cared for him. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following was\nwritten by hospital volunteer Rakesh Misra.<\/em> To protect privacy, identifying information has been removed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man died at The Ottawa Hospital. And no one was there to\ncry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is my eulogy to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I met him almost five years ago when I started volunteering\nat The Ottawa Hospital. My first memory of him is watching him as he shouted at\nnurses. He shouted a lot…at everyone. A social worker once told me he was\n\u201cfeisty.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He once asked his doctor to donate her kidney to him and\ntried to convince her by saying that this could be the most generous doctor\/patient\nrelationship ever!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To all the nurses (and doctors) who took care of him: he\ntold me many, many times how nurses were the kindest, most compassionate,\ngenerous humans. I saw that in the years I watched them take care of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the moment that he died, the last words he might have heard were from a song by one of his favourite singers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The day he died, I walked into his room and watched two\nnurses gently wash him and change him, all the while speaking to him softly as\nhe groaned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later that day, a nurse had placed an iPhone playing music\nnext to his ear. In the moment that he died, the last words he might have heard\nwere from a song by one of his favourite singers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember when I accompanied him to one of his many medical\nappointments. A nurse asked him if I was his son. So he started referring to me\nas his son from that day on (I\u2019m only seven years younger than he was.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In those five years, I got to know him through his stories. He\nspoke of his fondness for his mother and his cross-continental road trips with\nhis wife and children. I got to know him as an aficionado of music in a\nlanguage he neither spoke nor understood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He wanted to live to be 100. And if he couldn\u2019t, he wanted\nme to promise that I would make sure his body was frozen so he could return! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on the day before he died, he told me he was ready. He\ntold his nurse the same thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then he died. At his bedside stood a nurse and me, a\nvolunteer, as two doctors pronounced him dead. And maybe I did cry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He called the nurses who cared for him the kindest, most compassionate humans. Volunteer Rakesh Misra reflects on this patient and the compassionate care the patient received.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":51432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[480,381,184],"class_list":["post-51431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthy-tomorrows","tag-compassion","tag-patient-experience","tag-volunteers"],"acf":[],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}