We are mortal humans, we suffer and love, hopefully together, and then we each die.

by Drew RosielleI went into medicine because I thought it ' d be something practical, to help people.I majored in English and Religion at the University of Iowa in the early 1990s, and didn ' t have clear career plans. I guess I thought I ' d become an English professor. Late in my undergraduate days I was enamored with the more experimental sides of 20th Century poetry (Gertrude Stein, Lorine Niedecker) and figured I ' d go on to grad school. To make ends meet in college, I got a part-time job cleaning a group home overnight for teenage boys with profound developmental disabilities. I liked to stay up late, and I could clean the house overnight and listen to the BBC World Service. And smoke (gosh I wish smoking cigarettes was a benign activity - so many pleasant memories). In the morning a couple other employees would come over, we ' d get the boys up, dressed, fed, teeth-brushed, and off to school.By my senior year, I was an assistant group home manager, and found myself in the surprising position of really, really liking working with these kids: dressing, feeding, toileting them, helping them do the few things they seemed to enjoy, trying to make meaningful connections with them. The latter was difficult - they all had autism (along with other developmental challenges), and several of them weren ' t verbal, or were so very rarely.We played music constantly in the home (mostly for the pleasure of those of us who worked there), and one of my warmest memories of that time in ...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: ethics ethics/law politics rosielle Source Type: blogs