JENNIFER MULLEY

Bank Street, March 3, 2017

“I’m not scared of dying at all. Death doesn’t scare me in the least. But I think more of the process of how I’m going to die scares me, and I see all these people going through it. And I think because it’s a fear of mine, of how I’m going to die, I think I see my patients living it every day, and I’m perceptive to how strong they are and how they’re dealing with it. How they’re getting through it. And I’m really receptive to how their husbands and children are when they come in, because I think that no one really knows what it’s like until you’re going through it yourself.

“So I’m really receptive to people going through the process of death. I see them living out my personal fears.

“And I know we can’t all live to 80 or 90. We don’t all get to be old. But does anyone think they’re going to die at 30 or 40 or 50? The really hard ones for me are the older patients with dementia and the younger ones with terminal cancer, parents with school-age children at home. Those are the ones that scare me.

“People come in to the pharmacy who have been diagnosed with cancer or an illness of which they’re going to die — cancer, mostly. A mother in her 40s with two young sons, for example, one of the first patients I met here, dying of cancer. You hear their stories every day — every day someone is being diagnosed, every day someone is dying — and you’ve known them for years.

“You get to know their families, you get to know their situation. You see them come in and they have no hair. They come in and they’re sick. You see their children and their husbands, and how do you deal with that, because it bothers you so much. It really does, but you have to, at the same time, remove yourself from it a bit. You can’t let it bother you or you wouldn’t be able to move on to the next patient. If you let it bother you, it would bother you so much.

“It’s difficult, as a health-care professional, when someone tells you they’re dying … ” bdeachman@postmedia.com