Marian Meehan

I’m Marian Meehan. I’m 69 years of age now. I’m here in St Francis. I have a tumor on the lung and I have five lymph nodes on the back of the chest bone. My own doctor from the hospital asked me did I want to go down to St Francis. I kind of got a fright. I said “am I that sick?” Oh she said no, she said it’s just that you can talk to people that’s in the same boat as yourself.

2: My job as an occupational therapist is to make sure that our patients can do what they need to do and want to do in their day to day lives and because of the different symptoms that are associated with their conditions, sometimes their daily routine is hard to engage in so we try and problem solve with them I suppose to come about with solutions to help them to engage.

1: So we come down to do different courses and it was a six weeks course. It was mostly exercises and breathing. Where I think if I wouldn’t have come down here that time, I think I’d be, either very sick or dead and all the courses that I’ve been doing is really made me stronger in myself, there was things that I was afraid to do like, go on the bus, go in to my sister and I achieved things that I was putting off like trying to clean the windows, things like that. So I achieved a good few goals that I thought I wasn’t able to do.

2: So the outpatient and day service or OPDS, it’s a new and dynamic and innovative service that was started in May 2022 here in the hospice. It’s available to all patients who are under the care of the hospice and who are living at home. So the idea is that the patient is put at the center of the model of care with the multidisciplinary team collaborating to make the best plan of care for them, taking into account their needs, their preferences and their wishes. In the OPDS model, patients have access to all members of the multidisciplinary team and a wide variety of group programs as well and she is attending a nursing lead group called ‘care’. ‘Care’ is a nursing led program, it occurs here once a week and patients might come in every fortnight or every month depending on their own need and what suits them.

1: And I’ll be getting my hair done, and I’ll be getting a message then in the afternoon. In between that, I’ll have my dinner. We’ll have a chat, we might have a bit of a sing song for an hour before we go home. Or there could be something different, could be dancing. Well if I can try, I’ll try and dance because that’s what I came down here for. You really get strength from them, you know and everything else that you do is very good.