HEALTH
words by ROXANE B. SALONEN photography by LINDSEY WAGNER
CHI Health at Home
WALKS WITH FAMILIES in LIFE’S QUIET RIPPLES agency offers home-health, palliative and hospice services
We may not be able to cure, but we can help the patient and family heal. — M IC H E L L E C OOL E Y
T
he connections we make at our life’s beginning grow and spread slowly and widely over time, like ripples when a pebble drops into the water. But as we near our end, Michelle Cooley, observes that those ripples become smaller, more focused and inward. “Most people, as they’re nearing the end of life, family and others they are closest to and love the most become very important,” says Cooley, FNP-C, ACHPN and hospice nurse practitioner for CHI Health at Home. “To be able to have family surrounding them and giving them love and their presence is very healing.” CHI Health at Home helps foster the kinds of memories that bring comfort and meaning in these times, turning them into gifts. “We may not be able to cure, but we can help the patient and family heal,” Cooley says, adding that CHI also provides bereavement services for the family after the loved one dies.
Cooley, a nurse practitioner who now works as a consultant for hospice nurses, has worked the gamut of areas in nursing, from premature babies to geriatrics. “I’ve taken care of babies just over a pound to elderly patients over 106 years old,” she says. In the early 1980s, when the ministry of hospice was just developing, she volunteered for a hospice agency, spending time reading to patients, helping them write letters, or just sitting with them in quiet moments. She’s now rediscovered the importance of this phase of care. “I just think it’s so important patients die with dignity and have a good quality of life until they die,” Cooley says. “We’re all going to die, so let’s make it a good death.” With improved palliative-care services and symptom management, it’s more possible than ever, she says. “I work with an entire team — everyone from chaplaincy to social work to working with nurses, physicians and nurse aides.” She works not only in the Fargo-Moorhead area, but with outlying regional CHI agencies, including those in Williston, Valley City, Dickinson, Bismarck in North Dakota; and Little Falls, Breckenridge and Albany in Minnesota. “What’s different with us than some of the other (hospice) agencies is that we offer home health, palliative care and hospice services, so there is continuity of care,” she says. “Often the patient has the same nurse the whole way through.”