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    Be the Noodle: Fifty Ways to Be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver
    Be the Noodle: Fifty Ways to Be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver
    Be the Noodle: Fifty Ways to Be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Be the Noodle: Fifty Ways to Be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver

    By Lois KELLY

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    About this ebook

    Part how-to manual, part love story, Be the Noodle shows readers how to help a loved one die at home. You'll learn how to stay sane, take comfort in sick humor, tap into superpowers you never knew you had, and become a crazy-good caregiver -- one of the most courageous jobs most of us never want or have ever been trained to do.

    With humor and grace Author Lois Kelly shares the the gut wrenching, like not being able to call 911 during a crisis once you sign up with hospice, to the mundane, like dealing with too many banana breads from well wishers, to the rarely talked about, like advocating for patient martinis with the oncologist.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMay 14, 2010
    ISBN9780996313728
    Be the Noodle: Fifty Ways to Be a Compassionate, Courageous, Crazy-Good Caregiver
    Author

    Lois KELLY

    Lois Kelly, an author and marketing strategist, counsels executives in large corporations like FedEx, SAP, HP, Fidelity Investments, Dunkin' Donuts, TJ Maxx, SAS Institute, University of Massachusetts, The Conference Board, USAA, Sapient, Communispace, and many more. They hire Lois presumably for help on communicating change and mobilizing word of mouth marketing. The unstated, real reason they hire her is that they are rebels at work, looking for a rebel emeritus who can guide them in successfully shepherding their change agendas inside large, complex organizations – and outside to customers. Being a rebel can be dangerous, and they recognize the value of having an experienced guide.

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      Book preview

      Be the Noodle - Lois KELLY

      Kelly

      Updated Introduction: Caregivers Need An Adventure Guide

      Six years ago I published this book because I wanted people helping a loved one die to know that they’re not alone. I wanted to share my experience helping my mother die so that people might find the courage, love and sick humor to be fully present with the person they love. To make a sad part of life, a treasured part of life.

      I am so humbled and joyful knowing that this little book has done just that for many. I am also grateful that people have been kind enough to tell me how the book affected their lives.

      One of my favorite stories came from a family in Alabama.

      My niece gave the book to a friend at college whose father was dying. She was at school, away from her parents, sick with worry and grief. She read Be the Noodle and sent it to her mother. Then her mother called and said, Come home.

      A few months later Kelli’s mother wrote, "I had no intention of sharing with Kelli or her brother the last 15 days when the dying had begun. My husband and I did not want those memories to be our children’s last memoires of their father.

      "But when Kelly read Be the Noodle and told me about it, it allowed me to share with her the most agonizing, poignant, intimate, and life-changing experience of our lives.

      Thank you for helping us remember my husband’s final days not with agony and heart break but as his caregiver, the ‘most courageous, inspiring and rewarding job I never wanted.’

      Be The Noodle is a caregiver’s adventure guide, based on my wild, wondrous and life changing journey helping my mother die at home. A lot of people have said, Why write about something so depressing? The answer is that helping someone during their final months can be inspiring and rewarding in ways that you never thought possible. You can find superpowers that you never knew you had. So while this is about dying, it’s also about possibilities.

      An adventure is defined as an experience that can be both terrifying and inspiring because you enter into a flow that is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. Helping someone die can be one of life’s greatest adventures.

      I hope that some of the 50 lessons in this book help you navigate the adventure and become a compassionate, crazy-good caregiver, one of the most courageous jobs you never wanted.

      With joy and gratitude,

      Lois Kelly

      May, 2016

      PS – Remember to pay it forward, passing the book along to someone who has entered the caregiver journey. They will appreciate it much more than a banana bread or casserole.

      Swimming Too Far Out

      My mother and I are sitting on a stretcher in the basement hallway of Mass General Hospital. Our winter coats are piled in a heap next to us. It’s 12:30 in the morning, dark and frigid outside, but in the bowels of this giant Boston hospital it is bright, hot and chaotic.

      The fluorescent overhead lights are loud, making a buzzing sound like those annoying bug zappers you hear in the summer. The woman on the gurney across the hall is telling the emergency room physician that she has no friends or family in the United States. Just her boyfriend, who earlier in the day broke her neck and nose. Next to us an elderly woman with gnarly hands and green eyes moans alone.

      A camera crew from ABC-TV is dodging the incoming patients, looking for people to interview for a documentary on urban hospitals.

      How about us, asks my mother Bette, as in Bette Davis? We’ve got a good story now. They ignore us, two middle-class, nicely dressed women laughing and talking amid so much human drama.

      Ninety minutes ago the doctors told Bette that the headaches and vision problems she’s been having are cancer. In fact, her head is loaded with malignant tumors. Not one, not two, but many. Next stop: the neuro-oncology ward for more questions, more tests, and more experts. The only certain thing is that Bette’s long-term prognosis is not good.

      As we sit waiting for a hospital room to open up Bette turns to me and says, We can do this. It won’t be easy but we can. I know we can.

      Bette has decided that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in hospitals or be sick any more than is likely to eventually happen.

      I’ll be open to what the specialists have to say tomorrow, she says. But what I really want is to go home and live at my little house and walk the beach as much as I can. I don’t want to live the rest of my life sick from treatments to prolong my life for who knows how long. I know you all will help me do this.

      In this case do, meant that Bette would do everything in her power to help us help her. But no hospitals. No live-in medical help. No extraordinary measures. Just living at home as comfortably as possible, cared for by family instead of medical clinicians. (This was not the time to tell her I couldn’t even help my son when he got sick to his stomach; how the heck was I going to be able to do this cancer thing?)

      I believed Bette that early morning in the hospital basement as I have always believed my mother when she was convinced something was possible. It was a pattern of our lives.

      Bette’s belief that we can do this was like her unwavering belief that if you know how to swim you’ll be fine even when you swim too far out and the current starts pulling.

      My late father would sit on the beach worrying as Bette swam out into the ocean. What if she got a cramp? Got caught in a strong current? Who could save her then?

      Why can’t she stay closer in or use one of those swimming noodles like other people who go far out, he’d ask us as we watched Bette swim further and further out to the horizon.

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