How does someone manage to stay perky and upbeat when a major portion of their life is spent working with the terminally ill?
You’d think 29 years in the hospice line of work — that is, caring for people who doctors have determined may have less than six months to live — might be draining, but Betty Martinsen, at 64, is as optimistic as ever working at Community Home Health & Hospice, 3102 N.E. 134th St. in Salmon Creek.
“My father was a psychiatrist, and he’d walk out the door every morning and say, ‘I’m out to stamp out mental illness.’ So what I say when I leave the door in the morning is that I’m out to stamp out pain and suffering,” she said.
That lifelong mantra and sense of duty won her the Nurse of the Year Award last month by the Home Care Association of Washington, and she was honored in Seattle on April 29.
“Betty is always willing to take on tough cases and has a caring and professional way of taking each and every patient and family under her wing, giving amazing individualized care,” Tashina Wilcox, registered nurse and clinical coordinator at Community Home Health & Hospice, said in a news release about the award.
Martinsen received her bachelor’s degree in nursing while in the Army during the Vietnam War. She started as a registered nurse while stationed at Fort Polk, La., then lived in Germany, Utah and Texas and eventually Washington.
She discovered the hospice branch of nursing from a church friend with whom she would go on walks with. At the time, she was 36 and had taken five years off to raise her children, and she was eager to get back to work. From then on, she worked at a number of hospices and even started one of her own in Southwest Portland, called Bristol Hospice. (She said that it’s easier to open a hospice in Oregon than in Washington, because in Washington, one must prove a “need” before it’s approved. According to Martinsen, while there are dozens of hospices in Portland, there are just three in Vancouver.)
These days, she wakes up every morning and commutes about an hour to her job in Clark County, where she started working in 2013. Her days aren’t usually spent in the facility itself, though. While some who are ill may go to the facility to live out their days, the point of hospice is to be where one is most comfortable, and that’s generally in the patient’s home.
“What we do in hospice is we provide comfort — physical, emotional, spiritual support for patients who are going through this difficult time in their lives. If their goal is to get every treatment that’s available and fight and go to the hospital and get intensive care, then that’s great, but it’s not what we do,” Martinsen said.
Martinsen takes on the hospice’s more “complicated” cases: patients who have more intensive symptom management problems or convoluted social situations. Such cases include someone with a restraining order against a loved one, a pediatric case (a child), or, one unusual case of a hoarder in Yacolt.
“He and his wife live in a tiny little house that they’ve lived in for 50 years. They built it themselves and they don’t throw anything away. But they’re just sweet people and a lot of the other members of my team, sometimes aren’t comfortable with that,” she said. “They think they should be out of there, that they should move somewhere else. Well, they don’t want to move somewhere else. This is what they do.”
When she isn’t zooming around to patients’ homes, Martinsen is at the center doing admissions — when families come in to learn about the hospice process. At that point, people tend to be very anxious, she said.
Although she manages to not get herself too emotionally tied up in any one case, Martinsen said it happens on occasion, especially regarding the family more so than the patient. The patient is more at ease than the family, who will be left to pick up the pieces after they die.
“Every once in a while, you do (get hung up emotionally). Mostly I tend to do this well, because I see myself as a travel agent. I’m meeting these people knowing that they’re going on a journey that I’m not going to follow them on,” she said. “So I get connected to these folks, and I love them, but part of the reason we have this relationship is because they are going elsewhere and I’m not going with them.”
Martinsen is most impressed by how families will step up, even if their loved one was a particularly tough-to-deal-with curmudgeon most of their life. She recalled a homeless patient in Texas who had been a drug addict and abusive to his family.
“His sister let him come live in their house because he was family. And she took care of him at the end of his life,” she said.
She’s working on a book about her experiences.
“You meet these heroes. That’s the title of my book, ‘Hospice Heroes.’ Because that’s what impresses me. Not only the patients and what they’ll tolerate and how patient they are sometimes, but also their family members and how they step up and do really hard things to care for their loved ones,” Martinsen said.
Correction: Betty Martinsen was named Nurse of the Year by the Home Care Association of Washington. The name of the organization was misstated in the original story.
