Nurse Julie McFadden has catapulted to fame online for her candid way of talking about not just her work but mortality and death itself, particularly as a person who confronts it through her patients on a daily basis. The Hospice nurse spoke to surgeon Dr Karan Rajan on his podcast as the pair delved into the taboo topic.
The former ICU nurse revealed that while death can often be a painful and devastating process depending on what a person is dying from, she noticed “after years of experience” that patients who were willing to openly discuss their own death were far better off. She highlighted that it didn’t even have to be an optimistic conversation.
Nurse Julie shared: “Even in a negative way; ‘I'm afraid, I don't want to, I'm angry’. They all seemed to have a lightness. They lived better while they were still alive. And their dying process, which does take a long longer time usually on Hospice, seemed easier. Less agitation, less pain, but then also less emotional pain, all because they spoke about it.”
The nurse admitted some aspects of death are still a mystery even to the professionals and she’s not sure whether it’s admitting to fear, accepting death or just verbalising the situation that actually helps. The patient just had to be honest, she discovered, and ask for help whenever necessary as she praised the hospice teams available to patients.
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She shared: “You have professionals who do this day in and day out. There's a chaplain who most people like will deny the chaplain because they're not religious… no, this chaplain is an amazing person who's just there to help you… like a free therapist. Let them come over, let them hang out.”
Being a former ICU nurse, Julie also revealed she had a new respect for following the body’s lead in the final days as she compared deaths in the hospital to those in hospice: “We pump people full of fluid and then we fluid overload them and then they go under respiratory distress, then we intubate them, then we diurese them, then we hurt their kidneys and it's that cycle over and over again.
"When I saw my first death on Hospice, I was, I feared death so much less because I was like, wow, you could see how doing nothing to the body and allowing the body to just naturally die - there are things that our bodies do to help us do that."
