News: Celebrating life – Dene’s Story
News: Celebrating life – Dene’s Story
“I wasn’t told that I need to finish work. That’s a big one, because work is my passion. I’m a teacher and work with kids. Getting up and getting out of the house, having something to eat. Spending time with my whânau. That’s important to me.”
This July your support for our nurses can help change someone’s life. I’d like you to meet Dene, who, because of the care enabled by our generous community, was able to get his quality of life back.
But before I tell you about Dene, I want to share with you the challenge we are facing, and I hope you will take up the opportunity to be part of the solution.
Our hospice patients need your help. At the heart of hospice’s services are our nurses. With rising demand for our services and increasing costs, we need you more than ever to keep this essential service going strong. This year it will cost us $2.6 million to fund our nurses. The good news is, we have already identified $2.5 million of that total. That means we still have $100,000 to go. Without this $100,000 we will be unable to fund our full programme.
I am asking you to help reach this goal. Please help us close this gap by giving a gift of $25 or $30 today.
You can donate through our website here
Dene just celebrated his granddaughters first birthday and is enjoying teaching Te Reo and Kapa Haka three days a week. This picture looked a bit different this time last year. Twelve months ago, Dene was really down in the dumps. He has prostate cancer and just before his birthday last year his symptoms were getting bad.
“The first nurse who ever spoke to me was the one that really opened it up for me. As soon as I told her how much pain I was in and how I felt after taking the medication, she went through what I could do to take control back.
I managed to wean off some medications and go off others entirely. I no longer had to wake up every four hours in the night to take medication, and I felt better than I did when I was taking all of them. I even managed to put weight back on – I can eat a whole pie again!”
I asked Anne, one of our nurses, what hospice care means to her. She’s been with Cranford for over 30 years and describes the experience from the patients’ perspective.
“You’re on a life journey; you know who you are. You have plans for when you retire, or if you’d like to have more children. Then all of a sudden you find yourself on a different path … it’s dark, and you can’t see anything ahead. You’re on this road and people relate to you differently. You can’t read the road signs, they’re all meaningless.
Hospice nurses hold the hands of people, guiding you through this new unknown path. They help translate the new road signs, giving knowledge for the path ahead so you can live as well as you can for as long as you can.”
That’s why it’s so important that we fully fund our nurses.
Without our nurses, Cranford simply can’t serve the people who come to us in their time of need. Nurses have the expertise in palliative care and the specialist knowledge that help people like Dene to take control of their symptoms, so they can live every moment. To Dene, it’s about living his normal life. He’s passionate about his work as a Te Reo and Kapa Haka teacher and continues to teach three days a week because for him, that’s what living every moment looks like. It’s about making sure his tight knit whânau are on this journey with him.
We’re asking you to help us close this $100,000 gap, so patients and their loved ones can continue to receive quality end of life care at no cost to them. Through a gift of $25 or $50 you can help our nurses be there for families and whânau u when they need it the most.
You have an amazing opportunity to make such a difference in the lives of people being cared for by hospice.
Thank you so much for your time and support,
Janice Byford-Jones
Chief Executive Officer
The Cranford Hospice Trust
P.S: There can be so much life in-between being diagnosed with a life-limiting condition and death. Cranford is there to help people make the most of their time left. Will you help our nurses support people to live every moment? Through a gift of $25 or $30 you can help us close our funding gap to ensure we can reach those who need us.
