Leave It Better Than You Found

Emily Jacobs went to nursing school because of the months she spent caring for her boyfriend after a routine surgery went wrong. She was twenty-four, had a degree in journalism, and had never done anything like it. What stayed with her was not the wound care. It was standing in a hospital room with no idea how to help.Twenty years later she is a hospice nurse with ten years of emergency medicine behind her and a master's degree in medical cannabis from the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, a degree she pursued after her own rheumatologist refused to keep treating her when she became a legal medical patient.In this episode, Emily and Chance talk about the medicines people are afraid of and what that fear costs a family at the end of a life. Why she describes cannabis as leveling rather than getting high. Why the stigma around it was built on racial and political history rather than pharmacology. And why the same conversation she once had to fight to have about her own body is the one she now walks into living rooms to have about morphine, usually with people who are certain it means the end.Her invitation to anyone facing this: you do not have to have it figured out first. Come messy, and we will figure it out together.Emily Jacobs, RN, is a registered nurse with Hospice of the Chesapeake.To Know Ends is presented by Chesapeake Health Partners in partnership with Hospice of the Chesapeake.