While We Still Have Our Wits

Perry Platt was an EMT, then an ICU nurse, then a travel nurse, and none of it fit. She kept moving until she found the one place her puzzle piece finally clicked into place: hospice. Perry is a Hospice Inpatient Center Clinical Manager and nurse at Hospice of the Chesapeake, and she is thirty years old, in a field most people picture as older. That vantage point changes everything she sees. In this episode she takes on the words that scare people before anyone explains them, hospice and morphine, and shows what they actually mean. She walks through the gap between what hospice offers and what people take, the difference between giving up and choosing your goals, and why comfort is not the same as surrender. And she makes a case aimed squarely at her own generation: that the best time to decide how you want to be cared for is now, on an ordinary afternoon, while you still have every wit about you to do it right.This one is for anyone who has ever flinched at the word hospice, anyone who has been putting off a conversation they know is coming, and anyone who assumes this is a subject for later. Perry's answer is that later is a choice too, and not always the one you would make for yourself. There is beauty in the hard moments, she says, and there is real power in choice. The question is only whether you want to come to a slow stop, or an abrupt halt.