Shanghai Daily news

The hardest moment came when 54-year-old Xu Daohang, who had stoically undergone ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver, quietly asked Xie Yizhen whether she was going to die.
"Everything will be okay. I'm with you," the head nurse of Anning Hospice whispered, holding the patient's cool, bluish hand. Her tearful, grief-stricken husband sat quietly beside the bed, praying silently.
A few hours later, Xu passed away peacefully with no more pain and suffering. Xie verified the patient's death, placed the body on its back with a pillow under the head and wrote down the time of death in a notebook she has kept all these years.
As a hospice nurse providing end-of-life care to dying patients at Linfen Community Health Care Center in Zhabei District, Xie has witnessed many people's final months over the past 10 years, watching those skinny, lanky bodies hopelessly battle with various incurable diseases such as liver, lung and bone cancer.
"Body snatchers or grim reaper, I don't care how others look at this hospice," the 53-year-old Zhabei native said with a bitter smile. "What I am trying to do is help those dying patients finish their life's last days in comfort and to die with dignity."
At Anning Hospice, medical testing and cancer treatment stops; only the palliative practice and patents' care continues.
The smell of death, mixed with pungent alcohol-based disinfectants, casts a deep gloom over every corridor and ward which are full of inert dying patients, moaning painfully or staring at the ceiling motionless.
"Unlike other nurses and doctors in an ordinary hospital where they can feel rewarded and gain a sense of success by curing patients, I am faced with death everyday," Xie said with a sigh. "Here, death is only a matter of time."
Ten years ago when the Shanghai native was transferred from a hospital in Anhui Province to Anning Hospice of Linfen Health Care Center, she didn't know how challenging the job would be.
"I felt dirty and terrified at first," she admitted. "If handled improperly, it would be easy for us to get infected with disease from patients' excretions."
Worse, Xie found that dealing with those people coming to the end of their lives gradually had a negative effect on her own life; the frequent deaths of the patients made her gray and depressed all day long.
"There was a period of time when I thought I could not hold on any longer," she recalled. "If I had some minor ailment, I would fancy it was a cancer or some other serious disease and I forced myself to do physical checks over and over again."
However, as time went by, the devout Buddhist and born optimist soon left her gloomy mood behind.
"I kept telling myself to have some faith. My job is not only about death but also about love and sacrifice, especially when I see the patient's desperate eyes," she said. "This is important work, because the goal is worthy."
Xie believes that everyone should be confident of receiving compassionate and appropriate care as he or she enters their final days.
She cleans up the patients' excretion, checks their amount of urine daily, chats with them, consoles relatives and even throws birthday parties for those approaching death.
Over the years, she has seen too many tragedies - some had a suicide plan and attempted to end their lives without success, while others yelled at the nurses, refusing any medication or care.
"I understand them," said Xie. "These were people who had been stuck between not wanting to live and not wanting to die before their illness took hold. What I am doing is helping them reach a place of peace, to be no longer afraid or in pain, to be able to say good-bye to their families with love and to die peacefully."
In Xie's notebook she records each patient's information in their name, age, affliction and the time they moved in and the time they died - some 360 in all. She always locks it away in her drawer.
"When I was leafing through the notebook and reading the records I had made, I came to understand life and death. Far from being the inevitable end to life, death is a learning time when we have the last opportunity to resolve and complete the deepest lessons of our lives," Xie said.