My Hospice Blog – You can learn a lot if you shut up and listen.
A well-trained hospice volunteer knows you can learn a lot from your patient if you shut up and listen.
I haven’t been able to visit with Henry recently, because I’ve been in the hospital having a second knee replaced. If you remember I had my left knee surgery in July. Over the years the pain had increased to the point that I looked forward to having two new knees.
In my family, crippling Arthritis is handed down from generation to generation like an old overcoat no one wants to wear. Many relatives my mother’s age lived out their days in a wheel chair or walking in great pain with canes or crutches. Like them I had no cartilage in my joints and walking had become very painful.
Here’s a detail from a previous visit I want to share.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Henry appreciates a cup of hot tea with milk and a muffin. He told me again how blueberry was his favorite type of muffin. As he removed the cover from his tea, I slid the muffin from its bag. He was leaning back in his recliner chair with a napkin spread across his belly just in case he lost a crumb or a blueberry.
The muffin it was still very warm. Steam rose as he broke the muffin in half. He offered me half and remarked that the blueberries were scattered evenly throughout the muffin. “Scattered” is my word. He described them as “suspended” in the batter. I asked him why the blueberries didn’t sink to the bottom and he didn’t know for sure. He liked to cook, but never took the time to bake. His theory was that something had made the berries float, but not to the top.
When I mentioned that he analyzed the situation like an engineer, he told me he was an engineer, a self-taught engineer. To be specific he was a tool and die maker. That’s a craftsman who makes precision tools used in manufacturing processes. That’s a trade he learned as an apprentice in a shop where his father worked for many years before Henry was born.
Over a century ago many men with technical and artistic skills moved between the careers of tool maker and engineer at different times of their life, depending on the turns of their particular educational and career path. I later learned that it was only after World War II that engineering became a profession defined by a university or college engineering degree. That began the separation between blue-collar and white-collar jobs in manufacturing.
While Henry talked, I used my smartphone to look up “fruit suspended in batter.” I learned that you should take your blueberries and roll them liberally in flour. That way the fruit won’t sink to the bottom of the muffin tin before the batter cooks.
Who would have thought that a good muffin was a triumph of engineering?
