20 Years in Homecare If There Wasn’t Homecare

by Sherry L. Thomas, BSN, MPH

One of my favorite movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  I watch it every Christmas.  In the movie, the main character gets a glimpse of what it would be like had he never been born.  And of course, the message is that all the wonderful impacts he had during his life would have never occurred.  Through all the ups and downs in homecare, I do have to say, it’s been a wonderful life.

I am entering my 27th year in homecare.  It was during my senior year of high school that I decided to become a homecare nurse, although I didn’t even know that was what it was called.  But that year my dad died.  He had wanted to die at home, but without homecare in our rural community back in 1973, we didn’t know how to care for him at home or how to control his pain.  So from that point on, I knew that homecare would be what I would do for the rest of my life.  Somehow, I would become a nurse and help patients and families stay home.
Without homecare:

• My 15-year-old prenatal patient would not have had the support she needed – alone and pregnant in rural NC – to deliver a healthy baby in the 1980s.
• Mr. B., a retired minister, would not have recovered from his many CHF exacerbations.
• A very tired and worried mother would not have been able to cope with her child’s very debilitating muscular dystrophy.
• A 17-year-old postpartum patient would not have had someone to tell that she feared she would soon hurt her baby.
• An elderly mother would not have been able to learn the technical skills needed to control her daughter’s cancer related pain.
• The newborn baby who lived down an impassable road would have not had someone to carry the apnea monitor through the woods.
• An elderly husband would not have had the opportunity to care tenderly for his wife of more than 60 years until she died at home.

Without homecare, we all would not have the opportunity to give compassionate, one-on-one health care—care we dreamed of giving in nursing school, and that should be available for every patient.

As Shakespeare wrote:
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest:  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

Homecare is like the quality of mercy—it blesses those who provide it with wonderful moments and memories, and it blesses those we care for with what they desire most…to be at home.

Sherry is the Senior Vice President for the Association for Home and Hospice Care of North Carolina, and the South Carolina Home Care Association.  She has worked with these associations for 14 years.  Sherry began her career in 1980 as a home health nurse in a public health department.  She later served as the Director of Clinical Services in a hospital-based home health agency, started the Community Alternative Program for the Elderly in Wake County, and worked as a regulatory nurse for a free-standing home health agency.