Why this blog?

Around 25 years ago, I convinced my grandmother to write a memoir. Naturally, it was in pen on (gasp) paper. That, of course, would never do. I was blinded by new technology. I was an idiot. I convinced (read "paid") my daughter, Miriam, to type Bubbie's manuscript up on my Commodore 64. Then, to make matters worse, I edited the typescript. Then I printed it out and had it copied and bound.

Now, the actual original manuscript, what Bubbie actually wrote with her own hand, is lost forever. It's probably somewhere in the house, but that pretty much counts as lost forever.

Now, I'm at that age. My kids have not asked me to do this, but I'm doing it anyway. I'm still amused enough by technology that I don't want to do a handwritten manuscript. I also don't think I can achieve the kind of dramatic impact that Bubbie managed with a formal autobiography. So, instead, I'm doing a blog with random memories from the past and the present scattered in a disorganized way.

This blog is linked to my two other blogs.

http://henryandcarolynsecondhoneymoon.blogspot.com/ is the blog I started when I came down with cancer and pretty much stopped when Carolyn died.

http://henryfarkaswidowerblog.blogspot.com/ is the blog I started after Carolyn died; when I decided to continue blogging.

For what it's worth, there's a search engine attached to this blog right below this intro. That won't be worth much initially, but if this blog gets long and stays disorganized, then my kids and their kids will be able to use the search engine to find stuff if they're interested.

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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Healing

Writing/Cancer Support Group Tuesday 7/13/10

What does healing mean?
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Healing is a medical term. It refers to the process by which a part of the body that has a lesion (a wound, for example) gets back as close as possible to how it was before the lesion existed.

Doctors don't actually cure anybody. What they do is help the healing process along. If there weren't a healing process, people would fall apart a whole lot quicker than they do.

For example, when I used to sew up lacerations in the ER, what I'd do is clean out the wound because dirt and germs retard and prevent healing. Then I'd close the wouund with stitches. The person would thank me for curing them, but that's not what I'd done. I'd just made conditions better for more rapid healing than would have taken place if I hadn't done what I'd done. It's the healing process that did the actual trick of curing the patient. The stitches wouldn't last forever. Without that healing process, the stitches would fall out, the wound would re-open, and the patient wouldn't pay his bill. Fortunately, the healing process pretty much always kicked in.

The soft sciences have co-opted the term, healing, to mean something else. I'm not a soft science kind of guy so I'm kind of guessing here. I'd guess that the counseling type folks have re-defined the term, healing, so they could apply it to people who actually aren't going to get better at all.

In my hospice practice, the social workers and other counseling people tried hard to convince the patients that they were healing when, to me, and to the nurses, all their lesions were getting worse, and were incurable.

Eventually, I needed to buy in to the concept that even a dying person could heal in some way. So, the way I'd address the concept when I'd make a home visit is by encouraging the patient and the family to heal their relationships before the end came. Even when you're dying, relationships can heal.

That healing doesn't make any long term difference to the person who'd dying, but it can make a big difference to the family members who need to get on with their lives. Whenever we managed to get family members back together when they hadn't spoken to each other in years, I thought of that as a hospice triumph.
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