you can order pizza in palliative care

When my step-father was sick, i went to visit him in the hospital before he died. I talk about this story in the free audio Duck Ponderings Episode 08. Stones.

Here’s an extract of the audio transcript. My step-father and I had been talking about where to give his clothes and things, and he wanted to name a shelter in his obituary.

TRANSCRIPT
He asked me if I thought there was a [homeless] shelter where people could take dogs, because he was a huge dog fan, but he was very particular. They had to be large dogs. He was not a fan of small dogs (laughs). He said that small dogs weren’t actually dogs. And when they brought dogs into Palliative Care to snuggle with you, he loved it, he waited for it, he was so excited, and then when they left, he told my mother that they weren’t real dogs. That it probably wasn’t worth it, they weren’t real dogs. So he wanted to know if there was a shelter that would take dogs, because oftentimes people are refused admittance to a homeless shelter because they have a shopping cart full of stuff or they have three dogs, or a dog, or two dogs, or whatever.

So sitting in their hotel room – I keep calling it a hotel room – in his hospital room, he had private room, of course, because he worked there so they gave him preferential treatment — preferential treatment on the Palliative Care ward isn’t saying much because everybody gets everything. You can have a bath, you can have ice cream, you can have anything you want at any hour. You can order pizza. I think anything short of smoking cigarettes, but just about anything else can occur on that floor, in those 10 rooms. So while I’m sitting in front of them, I pull out my phone and I search …