
Starting 2025 selecting special musical goals with my students while starting my encore career this year as a nurse (which is quickly becoming my calling), I see how music offers routine challenge and focus for my students and therapeutic support for patients and families daily in our hospital. I am grateful for every lesson I get to introduce students to music and help them achieve their goals, and I'm learning more each day how effective music therapy can be for very sick patients and their stressed families and caregivers.
I came out for a break after a long morning caring for very sick patients, and found a volunteer pianist playing Amazing Grace. Her music wafted beautifully throughout the lobby while her service dog sat patiently beside her. I realized then that she was blind, so I approached her to thank her for the therapeutic break. She held my hand while a family member approached and told her how much it meant to her to have the comforting music while she waited for her mom to get out of surgery. The very next day I came out to the lobby for a break and heard a stunning flute and guitar rendition of Thais Meditation. I was drawn to the music again and found it was a guitarist I had met 9 years before and she remembered me from when I was pregnant with my second son and was hoping to schedule guitar lessons. As it turns out, the little guy who kicked when he heard the vibrations of the harp from within my womb, will be graduating from 4 years of music academy next month, having developed a love for music akin to mine.
Over the years, I have been asked to play for a friend for her final social with family before passing away, for another's Celebration of Life after losing his battle with ALS, my best friend's funeral after losing her battle with Leukemia when we were 15 years old, and my Grammy Nina's Celebration of Life, where her stylist told me she would have loved the light-hearted Jazz standards I played, since she always loved a party with her family.

As a nursing assistant, I worked in nursing homes with patients with debilitating diseases such as ALS, Huntinton's Disease, Advanced MS, Parkinsons and Dementia. I once had a patient with MS in a wheelchair and her husband had also developed early onset Dementia in his 40s. Though she could no longer move any of her limbs due to messages to her muscles failing her, she could help direct caregivers to provide the best care to her husband who was placed in the same room with her, and would often get frustrated and agitated because he could no longer care for himself. On Christmas Eve, I brought my harp in to play the residents a few tunes, and found that the man, Jerry we'll call him, was close to his last hours. His wife, Sharon, we'll call her, asked if I would stay with them when their son came to say goodbye for the last time with his family. I asked if she would like some therapeutic music, and was able to play for the family's last moments together, and then for Sharon, as she lay in the dark, afraid of all that was to come but grateful for the music to calm her aching soul.
I learned recently that one of our excellent trainers at the hospital was called the "singing nurse" during the pandemic when he worked in acute care and was known for always singing to his patients. He continues to bring joy and humor to the new nurses joining the profession, and says he still sings to his patients because it heals and calms in difficult situations over which we have little control.
While working in my nursing school community immersion clinical in Guatemala, we went out daily sometimes in torrential rains to visit young moms and babies suffering from malnutrition. We were lucky enough to have a team of Guatemalan women caring for us back at the clinic headquarters, after making rounds with very well training Guatemalan nurses. One day we learned it was one of the cook's birthdays, and we broke out into song, then dance all together, the music connecting us in celebration in one of the most spontaneous joyful moments of the trip.
We have a Care TV channel at work, and when we have confused patients or patients experiencing extreme anxiety, we help lower their blood pressure and provide a calming environment by putting on therapeutic music and meditative scenes in nature so their bodies can transition from a sympathetic flight or flight highly metabolic demanding condition to a energy-conserving parasympathetic "rest and digest" state. I saw this happen when I played harp for my first husband after he was run over and spent a month in the ICU fighting for his life. With low tones played on the harp, his heart rate got lower and he began to relax.
Just as we do to treat and support patients in the hospital, I plan to use multi-modal approaches to maintain my health and the health of my family in 2025. Healthy food choices, regular low-level exercise, and playing and listening to music that calms my soul will be my priorities while managing a stressful and anxiety-inducing job and schedule. I see the benefits from all sides now, of nurturing body, mind and soul. Now, if I could just figure out how to get more sleep...
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