We started the training with pain.

As an icebreaker to kick off the first session of Wabi Sabi Health’s (WSH) intense one-year training program at CanCare Foundation in Chennai, India, we asked the participants to write to a prompt.  

“You have 3 minutes to write down a time when you felt pain,” I said.  The nurse in front of me translated for those who speak Tamil. Heads down, some with concentration and some with confusion, they got to writing. 

I asked for volunteers to share what they had written. They spoke of deeply painful memories of parents and children they had lost.  Unexpectedly, one of the nurses wiped away tears as she shared about a loss she experienced in her own life 15 years back.

“Is any one surprised that pain is not only physical pain, but emotional and spiritual?” I asked. We sat in a circle and contemplated what it meant to identify pain in our own life and then related it to pain our patients see on a day to day basis.

WSH is working with 12 learners that work on the palliative care team to make them Palliative Care specialists.  These nurses are the frontline here, working intimatley with the sick and dying in their homes and at an inpatient facility. We spent the next hour taking a pre-course assessment, learning about the 8 domains of quality palliative care and sharing problems they encounter in daily practice.

Over the course of the next few months, they will engage in training in spiritual care, care to the imminently dying, communication and self reflection, using techniques from Narrative Medicine.

This work is hard. It starts with tears and often ends with tears but there is joy in the middle, in the helping and healing.