Aimee Mitchell, a hospice case manager with the Visiting Nurse Association, has found an additional role as a nurse who can sometimes grant last wishes.
A patient whose one wish was to see her daughter graduate from high school in Lincoln.
“I roped in the social worker and organized a graduation party in the patient’s backyard with the school vice principal there and everyone in caps and gowns to make the presentation” before she passed days later.
Another wanted to see his college son graduate in South Dakota. A pilot was on standby until the patient’s condition deteriorated, she said, but “the college then did a whole video production where they presented the diploma on stage with everyone in robes and ropes” with the father able to see the graduation before his death.
“I come up with these things. If you’ve got a goal for me, I’m going to go for it,” she said. “It’s to the point where the social worker sees me and asks what I’ve got planned now.”
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Originally from “the Illinois side of St. Louis,” Mitchell graduated from nursing school in 2010 and experienced different aspects of nursing before trying a hospice position and falling in love with it.
“I had always worked in a hospital before — in cardiac, mother/baby, urology, oncology. Unfortunately oncology and hospice kind of go together,” she said. “I was adamant about a hospice position and was hired before I even got to Omaha.”
COVID has been a struggle for all nurses, Mitchell said, but for nursing at end-of-life, it’s especially hard.
“That was a big struggle,” she said. “A lot of families try to take their loved one home for the final stretch of life, which is fantastic for the family and frees up hospice space. But now some are only allowed in during the final moments and it is heartbreaking. Like birth, death is a once-in-a-lifetime moment and you want family there.”
Video technology — such as the Zoom video conference app — has eased the separation. It’s particularly appreciated when extreme distance and COVID protocols make it impossible to be together.
“One of our patients had a son in
Poland who got stuck there, so we were able to get them together in a Zoom meeting,” Mitchell said. “In that instance, it was great that we were able to do that.”