← The Drop the Needle Podcast
The Drop the Needle Podcast
Ep. 37 Exploring Hospice Care & Spirituality with Martha Merry and Irene Doreste: Part 1
00:31:56
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Welcome to the Drop the Needle podcast, your backstage pass to the corporate jungle. I'm your host, Jim Alstatt. And here, industry titans step up to the mic sharing their epic journeys. We're hitting the high notes and the low notes of their careers, creating a symphony of success. This isn't just another interview show. It's where truth bombs are dropped and secrets are revealed. So grab your conductor's baton because who knows, this just might help you compose the next huge hit of your career. Are you ready? Let's go. Hi, everyone and welcome back to the Drop the Needle podcast. I'm your host, Jim Alstatt, and I'm so happy you all decided to join us. Today is a very special day and I'm going to tell you why. We have three of us on the podcast and that's the first time that this has ever happened. So fingers crossed it goes well. First of all, I'd like to welcome one of our guests, Ms. Martha Mary. And you probably remember Martha from a previous episode where we were talking about Martha, who is an RN who specialized in end of life care in hospice care. She also was or is a recent graduate of the Vanderbilt health coaching program. That's Vanderbilt health coaching program. I can get that out of my mouth. And is a national board certified health and wellness coach. The other guest we have is my podcast pic from Long Island. She's. Was it Teresa Caputo is the Long island medium. Well, this is another Long island medium. This is Irene Diresti, who also, also is an rn, if you all remember that, and happens to be a Reiki master. She's got NLP certification under her belt now. Crystal certification. What am I, what am I missing? Moon dance. All right. No, was it moonwalk instructor? Something like that. But I'm sure give her. Give two weeks and she's on to something and it's. And it's awesome. And I am so happy that both of you are here today and welcome.
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Thank you.
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C
Thanks for having us, Jim.
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B
Oh, excellent. I'm glad we were able to get this together and it's pretty cool. So what I'd like to start with is the topic of hospice care or end of life care. Martha, can. You know, some people may not be familiar with what hospice is, or they may have an idea of what they think it is, and it really isn't that. Can you give us a rundown on that and maybe talk a little bit about your experience and what hospice care is?
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A
Yeah, be happy to. So hospice care is a choice that an individual or a family can make. Hopefully the individual who's being placed on hospice care is at the point where they can say, yep, I'd like to do this, where there's a decision made to have a level of care that is more patient. It's always. I mean, patient care is patient focused. But really, we're not going to do anything curative anymore with the time that we have left in life, we're going to make the amount of time that this person has left in life before they pass as comfortable and with them calling the shots and on their own terms as much as it can be, hopefully in their own home. There are times when people need to be in hospice in a facility if their pain or their discomfort or their agitation can't be controlled at home with oral medications, even when somebody is what we call actively dying, when they are, they're very near, they can still have oral medications that help keep them comfortable. It's given under the tongue or you might have heard sublingually before. There are times when that just is not enough. And sometimes they need IV management. Sometimes the IV management can be done at home, sometimes in a facility. So when I've been involved with hospice patients and signed them on to receive this level of care, I just let them know, you're driving the ship. We're here. What can we do to make this experience as comfortable? We have these tools that we can help you with, but we want you to call the shots if you don't. And we tell the family members that take care of them, if they don't want to eat or drink today, don't make them eat or drink. You know, that can even be considered elder abuse in some cases if it's an adult. So let the person, they know what their body needs, and their body has a natural way of shutting down and just let them call the shots. So it's a different way of thinking. It's not curative. It's really a hard transition for families, too, because what do you do when somebody's sick? What can I do? Let me give you something to eat. Or they're going to get dehydrated. A whole different ball game. So as a Hospice nurse, you're there to really coach the family more than anything. Usually the patient, they kind of know what's going on even without even knowing, and they're pretty okay. It's the family that needs the most help most of the time. And we just make sure that everybody in that circle is okay.
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B
Well, and I can, I'll tell you from my perspective, I've had two family members in hospice. I was going to say fortunately, and it is fortunate in one regard. And then because we're. None of us are getting out of this alive. Right. So first of all, I'll say that, and it's not in an uncaring or flippant manner that I say that because I do think, and I've mentioned this before, that I think hospice people, hospice caregivers are very special people. And you had mentioned the medication under the tongue. I remember giving that to my grandmother who was in home hospice like morphine, like liquid morphine. And she would just say, oh, this tastes so bad. And I'd crush up those Starlight mints and try to make it a little better for her. And I remember that. And it was, yeah, again, special people. My, my dad was a little bit different. My dad was in assisted living for about a year and it got to the point where he started to go to the hospital more for care, and I could tell it was taking a toll on him. And it's, believe me, it's a tough subject to bring up because unless you've actually experienced it, I think some people might think it's like Dr. Kevorkian or something, you know, hook him up. We're just going to off him today. And it's not that by any stretch. There's people that come in to play music or just to sit and read or talk about. There's, there's also the, if the person's religious, they can have a minister come in there. It's, it's a one stop shop, if you will, for care. But it was different when, when my, my dad was, was going through it and he did end up. The last 10 hours of his being on earth were spent in a, one of those facilities.
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Yeah.
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When they thought, okay, it was time to get him there and no longer coherent. So this, just so you know, everyone, this is not a, hey, let's make everybody really depressed today.
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A
Right? Right.
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B
It's not intended to be that way at all because as most of you know by now, the left turn, right turn, whatever turn you want to call it or label it for the podcast has Been into more of a spiritual lean and knowing Martha, and I'll let her talk about this, but the spirituality piece of this and what we're talking about was something that I don't want to say fell on deaf ears because she's never been disrespectful in. In that regard, but it was always, yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. That's not my bag. Type of response to things in. And again, not being rude or anything, but she didn't have a buy in. But recently. Recently Martha went to see a psychic medium. Now, you may think that that's. Yeah, so what? You know, they're probably on a lot of different street corners and things of that nature. But for someone who doesn't have a belief in any of this, it's a big step. And with that, I'd like to have Martha, if. And she's agreed to this, can you go ahead and tell us what it was like?
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A
Yeah. Before I do that, I have to say two more things about hospice that I just need to get in there just in case anybody's listening and they're at a point in their life that they might need to consider. Hospice isn't to hasten or hinder the end of life. It's just to keep somebody comfortable with the time they have left. So there's nothing that hospice does to cause the end of anyone's life. It's. Can't do that. It's against the law, and we would never do that. The other thing I wanted. What?
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B
Unless you're in Michigan, I think they have that. That stuff you can say, I'm just kidding. I don't.
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A
Yeah, I have no idea. But the other thing I wanted to say, just about nursing in general, and Irene knows this too, as a nurse that, you know, when you decide that you want to be a nurse and probably in patient care in any way, you have to accept that it doesn't matter what the person that you're taking care of believes, there's still a human being who needs care. And so even if the person in the bed is a serial killer and you know it or you know something worse, if that you can think of, you're still a nurse and you still have to provide compassionate care to that patient. That's how I approached everything in hospice. That's how I approach everything in nursing. So when you described as I very much would, I went into situations where, like, this may be their spiritual belief, and I'm in support of that because that's what works for them. But it might not Be for me. So you're very right with. It's like, if that works for you, that's great. The part that's hard for me is I just have felt nothing for so long. I was raised with one faith. My father passed away when I was 13. That's a weird time to have a parent die. I was questioning faith at that time. And what happens after you die? And I've had this fear of death since then. Not of dying, but what happens after you're gone. So just recently, just you and I, are paths crossed again? You're doing this podcast. You're really exploring this. It's like all these things were put in my path for me to start, like, okay, let's explore this a little bit more. And one of them was a friend of mine is really into consciousness, and she went to see a guy for a tea leaf reading. And he's like, oh, we do all these other things too. And so I went to visit her in Ohio and she said, let's do. Let's see if we can channel somebody who's passed. Because he said that he could do that. He said, I can't guarantee a specific person is going to show up. You know, we don't have control over that, but we just are there and we just see what happens. So I had never. I just went in, just being open, like, okay, I don't really believe in it, but let's just see what happens. And it was. It was freaky. I mean, as soon as he said, I'm sensing somebody is here. As soon as he put his head down to do whatever he does to access whatever energy he's accessing, I felt this chill go through my body. And I don't know if it was anxiety or if it was something beyond that. I don't know, just happened. And then the first person that had stepped forward to him was a man who was older. Life of the party. Described the personality. I'm like, that's my dad. And then I'm like, okay, you know, he could have hit or miss with older man, blah, blah, blah, this personality. And then he goes, and did you have a brother? My mom and dad had a child who, who was electrocuted and died in front of them when he was 18 months old. And that's when I started crying. And he said, And I told the guy, I said, yeah, this is what happened. He said, well, he just wants you to know that he's with your brother, that they're together. And it was just like that. That just really got to me, you know, so then a couple more things that he hit on that were very, very interesting. But he said some things that were really comforting to me because I'm very science based. If you can't prove it to me, if you can't show it to me, I don't believe it's true. That's just my science. Mind and faith and spirituality just aren't really like that. I mean, you could argue that near death experience is. But I didn't experience it. So how do I know it's not the brain shutting down or whatever?
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Right? Yeah, gotcha.
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But he said, what did Einstein say about energy? It can never be created or destroyed. He's like, can you measure the body's energy? Can you measure brain waves? Can you measure heart rate? Can you measure blood pressure? What happens to that after you die? If it's never destroyed, where does it go? And so I'm like, wow, that's really good. I never thought of that before. I've had goosebumps even just talking about this. And my friend who I was with, she thinks of it as. Which was really comforting to me as well, because like I said, my big fear is what happens when we're not here anymore. She said, I think of it as like this consciousness. It's this different level of consciousness and it's all around us. It's just something we're not necessarily, necessarily picking up on all the time, but we go back to that collective, we came from it and we go back to it. And that to me, not such a being oriented type of God thing, that made more sense to me. So I love that I can choose and explore and I feel very open. And I always felt open to accepting what people believed in hospice. But now that I look back on some of the things I saw people do as they were nearing death, like reaching for things that I couldn't see or calling out to somebody who is their mother or their family member that I don't see that's not there, or that rally that they have seems much more. More plausible to me that that veil is a lot thinner and that it's there. Even so, that's a new perspective for me.
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C
That's.
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B
Yeah, that's big stuff. So Irene too comes from that science based lifestyle and I, I think that that's probably the best way I can even describe it. Is it? It is a lifestyle and this is how you're going to do it. My question for Irene would be this. So when you. And we've, we've already discussed this, I'm almost certain, but when you've made that, that call it a leap into the spiritual realm, how was that for you? Were you dealing with some of the same things that, that Martha was describing or experiencing?
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C
Well, yeah, I mean, I'm like you, Martha, you know, my logical mind, you know, being science based and everything has to be proven and you have to show me. And, you know, I was very much like that, you know, and I was living at that time in my humanness. Right. We were caregivers, we were. My behaviors, my beliefs, my identity was always wanting to do for people and help and care for. And then when you step into the 5D and above, like the spiritual realms is you really start using your right side of your brain. Right. You know, I shut off my logical mind and I open up myself up to spirit because you can't get there using that side. Right. So when you go within and you. And what I always say is spirituality is different than religion. You know, we're taught to believe certain things as, you know, whatever our culture is or, you know, our family upbringing. So we're taught to believe those things. But spirituality is believing in the power within and that we are all energetic beings living a human experience. So when I teach my classes and we get, you know, we get right in there I'm like, we have a mind, we have a body, but we're souls living a human experience. Because you're 100% right. We can, you know, measure an EKG, we can check a blood pressure, we can do EEGs with brain waves, but we can't. So when we do cross over and we. And it is. We are at the end of our days, there is that light, right? We do see that light. We do see our family members that come forward. Hopefully, listeners out there, your pets are one of the first people that come for you, right? Your guardian angels will be there, your closest loved ones. They're all energetic beings and. Right. So our body ceases to exist, our organs shut down, but we. We are energetic beings, and we will continue to reincarnate lifetime after lifetime because we're humans having. We're souls having a human experience that.
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B
Probably just blew Martha's mind, by the way. This is a school what.
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A
Actually not talk about this a lot, my friend. This is good. Yeah.
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C
So we come here to, you know, to let, like, let us all off the hook for a second is that we incarnate in this lifetime to come here and learn lessons, right? We're with our soul families and which we also reincarnate lifetime after lifetime. I mean, Jim and I, maybe we were had, you know, past lives together, and maybe we were, you know, we met in this lifetime for a reason, right? And some people are here to teach us, you know, you know, how to love and be compassionate and caring. But there's other people that came into our lives to trigger the shit out of us, right? And to really learn from those hard moments rather than just experiencing love, joy, ease and gratitude.
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B
So our meeting was probably the latter of those things.
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C
Out of you. But. But so when we. When we look at life and what we are, souls living a human experience, when someone gets close to their end of life, right, or they get a diagnosis that they know that the end is as near and there's little treatment left. It's great to be working with the families to come with that understanding of, you know, what? Like Jim Harshly said, we're all. No one's getting out alive. We're all going to go there. And there shouldn't be any fear around transitioning because we say, well, where do we go? You know, I had a fear of putting myself in the ground. Like, I don't want to be in the ground. I want, you know, I think I want to be cremated and sprinkled all over the place. Or, you know, I. So there's beliefs. Right. There's behaviors and beliefs and there's things that you, you know, you want to accept for people. I think I'm going down a rabbit hole, but so you can.
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A
That's okay.
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B
No, no, no, no. I'll get you.
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C
Transitioning out of this lifetime can be a beautiful thing. And we get, as humans get so caught up on the diagnosis and what happened or, you know, if it was, well, you're not going to go to hospice if it was a sudden accident, you know what I mean? But we either prolong it because we know it's in the, you know, in the near inevitable, near future or when someone gets taken away when we are not expecting it, something tragic. What we have to remember is we all have a birth date, but we all have an end date and we don't know, we're not aware of it. Right. So we celebrate our birthdays, but then when someone transitions, we celebrate the day they became an angel, you know, so to bring the light to it, there.
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B
Are a couple of things I'm going to go back to that you said. One is the religious aspect versus spirituality. And forgive me for whomever we, we had a recent conversation, I and, and I'm drawing a blank. It could be, it could have been Dr. Julie Foster, it could have been Gail Alexander. I, I don't recall. So forgive me, but we were talking about the differences here. And one is. Oh, I, I know exactly what it was. So one of my friends, my buddy Ken, so we were talking about the difference between spirituality and religion. And religion is outward and social and community based where spirituality is inward and it's in all of the things that are in the, the inside. And that's where I shouldn't say I have problems with. But every once in a while there's a, there's a level of, let's call it frustration that, that crops up with religion or organized religion in you go all the way back, you know, back in time when religion was used as a, as a tool to get land, wealth, you know, you name could have been people, a number of things, and it was used as a, you better adhere to what I'm saying or else. And it was usually through a cardinal or a bish or a priest or something like that versus, you know, that, I guess you talk about trigger. That's the type of thing that triggers me because you have anybody that leads with that? I question that's just me. I'm not throwing that out there and putting words in anybody's mouth, but I question it because Then you're taking everything else off the table. Now, the other thing, as I was trying to recall who it was I was having that conversation with, I forgot about. But it was one of the last things that you were talking about, Irene. Oh, was it. It might have been transitioning. Oh, yes. Yeah. No, it was life and birth. You know, your birth date and your.
- [24:49]
C
End date to have a birthday and an end date.
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B
So Joe McQuillan was a guest, and Joe's a fantastic guy. And we were talking and in the interview he had mentioned, and Martha and I had a conversation, I think, the other day about this, that there are essentially escape hatches that you have during your life on this Earth where you can have essentially an out, where if you want to leave, you can leave at this date. And there are usually. He was talking about it and he said they're typically three in people's lifetimes on Earth where, hey, you can make the choice. It'll be given to you. Do you want to leave or do you want to stay? And if you stay, okay, you're going to come back on Earth. You're. You're still on Earth, I should say. And then you have another one. And if that one you. The next one, you decide that you don't want to go to spirit or heaven or what have you, you stay. But the third one, no matter what, you're out. So it's like three strikes, you're out.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And it. That was interesting to me, which then brings in the whole near death experience.
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C
I was just gonna say that situation. You know what? There may be some truth to that. You know, if I imply that in my life, I don't. Haven't. I haven't had, you know, that. That opportunity yet for, you know, phase one. Right. Because you said you have three opportunities. I don't feel maybe, I mean, maybe, you know, I missed. Maybe there was an accident that would have come by.
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B
You don't know, that I missed.
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C
Right. My angels and guides put me on a different route that day, that I missed those opportunities. But if you ever speak to someone that has had a near death experience, and I've actually had the opportunity to speak with a few people that have. They all have the same common denominator. Right. They all had said that they were. They could see themselves outside the experience, whether it was the automobile accident or whether on the operating room table, and they could kind of see the whole situation. And they were unconscious at the time, so. And the science space, like, logically, they were unconscious and you knew that they you know, they were. Their eyes weren't open. They weren't responsive. Their pupils were dilated. There was no. Nothing medically that you could say how they would know all this information. And then they would say that they saw it from above. Most other people describe a light, a bright white light or a tunnel. Right. That they move through this. This tunnel. And some say they're scared. Some say they felt super peaceful, and they just followed the light. And then the third thing that the common denominator there was always an experience of God and this pure love. Like, they've never felt so much love in their life. Like it was just all encompassing. And the one woman that I spoke about, she actually had three young girls, three young children, and she didn't want to go back because of the love that she was feeling when she was on the other side. And the angels, or what she describes as angels, guided her back because her children needed her. But the love that she said that she felt when she was on the other side, she's like, I don't want to leave this, because here on Earth, she was struggling as a mom. Am I doing a good enough job, you know, making the bills and doing so? It was easier. She goes, it was easier for me to just check out at that time because I didn't want to go through the pain that I was going through in that lifetime. But they guided me back because my children needed me. And she came back into her body. She was on the table, and they said, it's interesting that she coded at that time on the table. When she woke up, she described the situation. And, you know, some people believed her, some people didn't believe her. So. So those are the three common denominators. They see themselves outside the experience. They all kind of say that there's some sort of tunnel or, you know, pathway that they get to. And then they've experienced this immense love. And usually a guide or a family member or someone, you know, kind of.
- [29:09]
B
Guides them, guiding them. Right?
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C
Yeah. And, you know, and I think that's beautiful because to tie it into people that are transitioning, when you see those things happening, they're reaching for someone, they're looking, they're gazing at, you know, people.
- [29:24]
B
A lot of times in our human.
- [29:28]
C
Lens, you can bring that into your hospice care and explain to the family members that this is such a beautiful experience and that when they do transition, there's only peace and love. There's no pain. They leave the physical pain of this human experience behind, and all they have is pure love. So you're scared of death and you're scared of going. And then. And like you said, your father and your brother are together, you know, and that's such a beautiful thing because I, you know, I lost my brother, my nephew, and, you know, a bunch of family members all within a certain year, you know, within the same year, two years. And. And when I did my, you know, mediumship, sometimes it's hard for me to connect to the people that I love because I'm too close to it. But they're all together. They're all together, you know, and we laugh and we talk, and I still communicate with them all the time. Not even just getting in through the mediumship stuff. It's just I look up into the sky and I'm like, show me my next steps. Like, what? You know, And I know my brother's laughing his ass off at me. Like, look at her go. But, you know, it's just, you know, it's life. It doesn't have to be so scary, you know, and it doesn't be so tragic. It's. It's tragic for the people you leave behind because we them, we miss them, and we want them here, and we have guilt that maybe I didn't do enough, maybe I wasn't there enough, maybe I could have changed the situation. But that's all our ego, that's all our mental mind, really, really just, you know, is the. What keeps us in those stages of grief and, you know, I just to tie it up is, you know, most people know the five stages of grief, but they never really talk about the last one. And the last one is acceptance. You know, I mean, not acceptance. I'm sorry. A new beginning, a new chapter to move on, right? We accept, we get to acceptance, but then we never. No one ever teaches us to now let go of the guilt, right? To just know that they're. They're there, they're looking, they're watching over us all time.
- [31:29]
B
The before we wrap up today's conversation, I just want to say how powerful and eye opening this episode has been. From Martha's firsthand experience with hospice care to the beginning of her spiritual awakening, we've covered a lot of ground. But guess what? We're just getting started. In part two of this conversation, we dive even deeper. You'll hear some wild and beautiful stories from end of life moments more insights into the energetic side of death and how our guests are helping others find meaning, connection, and healing. So be sure to come back for the next episode. You're not going to want to miss what's coming next. Until then, keep your heart open and your playlist strong. See you in part two.