When Joan Ryan was a child, her younger sister died. Memories of how her family coped with this are intertwined with recollections of a happy childhood and the seeds of a future career.
“I had a wonderful childhood: I lived by the sea and I had terrific parents,” Joan says.
“We had a ritual that every Christmas morning we would go to the cemetery and say hello to little Jan, then we’d go and have the most brilliant, happy day. It wasn’t a morbid thing, it was positive and inspiring.”
Because of that, Joan says, “I was always very comfortable around people who were sick and people who were dying and moving into that world of after death.”
What she didn’t realise at the time was that this experience was setting the foundations for a rewarding career in palliative care.
From nursing to palliative care in poorly resourced nations
Joan Ryan started her nursing career with stints in emergency and ICU, before realising her passion lay elsewhere.
“The thing I noticed more than anything was how people were dying,” Joan says. “I made a decision to go into palliative care nursing – which was just an emerging discipline at that stage – and I got one of the very first palliative care nursing positions in the state.”
More than thirty years later, Joan is a Palliative Care Nurse Consultant at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
Click below to read more about Joan and the experiences she has had far from home, when she provided palliative care education in Nauru, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste and India.
Source: Palliative Care Australia
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