“I Feel Like a Boy Let Out of School!"
Loren Hardin
The Ashland Beacon
This is part one of a series about Doc who enrolled in our outpatient hospice program at age sixty-nine with end stage kidney cancer. Doc had been the only physician in the small rural town of Beaver, Ohio. He was a "country doctor" in every sense of the word. His office was attached to the front of his house. Appointments weren’t required; patients were seen on a first-come-first-serve basis, and there were many late-night office and home visits at the request of friends and neighbors. Doc’s son, Brian, explained, "Dad belonged to the community. We couldn’t even go to the county fair without people stopping to tell dad about their aches and pains."
Doc was soft spoken, had a stealthy sense of humor and was a prankster at heart. Doc became animated as he told me a “once upon a time” story about a prank that he and his brothers played on the entire village of Beaver; “We filled a weather balloon with natural gas, attached a fuse to it, lit the fuse and released the balloon into the night sky over the town. After gaining altitude the balloon burst into a huge rolling ball of fire.” Then Doc, grinning like a possum eating a sweet potato, explained, "The next day the whole town of Beaver was buzzing about the UFO siting."
To be honest, I was anxious about meeting Doc for the first time. In fact, I was kind of dreading it. In route, I said to myself, "He’s a doctor. He’s smarter and more successful than I am. He’s probably wondering why he even needs to talk with a hospice social worker. So, I’ll do my song-and- dance, explain my role and he’ll probably say, ‘Thanks for stopping by, but I’ll call you if I need you.’" Boy was I wrong, as I usually am when I form preconceived ideas about people. Within the first five minutes Doc interrupted my song-and-dance and told me, "I almost died the other day. I was adjusting my insulin and gave myself too much. That’s why a doctor shouldn’t treat himself. I had an insulin reaction, and I went into a diabetic coma. I could feel myself slipping away, like I was leaving my body. I was looking down on myself and told myself, ‘I’m not ready to die! There are things I still need to do.’ I had to concentrate because it would have been easy to just slip away." I explained to Doc, “I’m not going to ask you what those things are that you still need to do, but when I come back in two weeks, I’m going to ask you if you did them.”
Two weeks later I returned and asked, "Well Doc, did you do them?" And Doc replied, "Yes I did. Do you want to know what the things were that I did?" I told Doc that if he wanted to tell me I’d sure be interested. Doc explained, "I contacted my attorney, and he came to the house, and I completed my estate planning; I made amends with my brother who I hadn’t talked to for a long time, and I made peace with my Maker. I’m fortunate that I’ve had the time to prepare. Do you know how I feel? Do you remember how it felt when you were young and you were out of school for the summer, when all your work was done? I feel like a boy let out of school."
Doc was fortunate to have had time to prepare, but we may not be as fortunate. Therefore, it behooves us to ask ourselves, “Are we ready? Are there things that we still need to do? Have we made peace with our Maker?” Wouldn’t it be good to “feel like a boy let out of school”?
"Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that. But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin," (NKJV, James 4:13-16).
Loren Hardin was a social worker with SOMC-Hospice for twenty-nine years. He can be contacted at 740.357.6091 or at lorenhardin53@gmail.com. You can order Loren's book, "Straight Paths: Insights for living from those who have finished the course", from Amazon.com.
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