Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: nurse

  • Healing Touch

    The hospital she worked in as a nurse offered a 1-hour introduction to Healing Touch. The very next day after she attended the intro, a patient with brain cancer was having a lot of difficulty mitigating pain.

    The family was doing massage, they were playing soft music in the room, they were doing calming touching, and speaking lovingly. Nothing was helping.

    She kept calling the doctor, asking for more pain medication for the patient, although the increases offered no relief.

    Finally, the doctor said he could not increase the dosage any more.

    Speaking to the patient, she explained that while they could not administer any additional medication, if the patient was open, she would do some Healing Touch.

    She prayed. She knew so little. She hoped it would help.

    It was as though she was in an altered state. Her hands got hot. She was almost out-of-body. She only did it for about five minutes.

    She stopped and then opened her eyes. Her brow was sweaty and her hair was damp.

    As she regained her focus, a family member gasped.

    The patient was peacefully sleeping….

    (Debra is certified in Healing Touch. Janet Mentgen, the nurse who developed the Healing Touch training program would tell her students, “Just do the work.”)

  • There with You!

    She was not a stranger to illness or death, but this was different—it was family. She was sitting at the bedside of her mother-in-law, who had been at home with hospice care for the past five months. Something had changed drastically in those wee hours of the morning.

    She called hospice, and the nurse arrived as quickly as possible. The nurse’s words, “You are probably looking at hours, not days,” confirmed what she intuitively knew.

    The support, kindness, and information the nurse brought was all vital, but it came with a surprising additional blessing of love and support: the nurse’s name printed on her name tag was the same as her daughter’s, including the last initial!

    Late that night, the call to her daughter about the passing of her grandmother included sharing of the coincidence. Through shared tears of loss and love, the granddaughter whispered lovingly to her mom, “See, I was there with you!”


    nametag