Working for a home health care agency, I get an interesting, even unique view of life. And also death, I suppose.

Working as a receptionist, I take calls from doctors old, delusional and senile enough to be patients. I take calls from patients who fabricate emergencies sometimes just for the company.

As a staffing coordinator, I have to press overworked nurses into service to go see patients who are near death's door.

Working in the file room, my curiosity and tendency to latch mercilessly onto things that interest me leads me to read the paperwork, narrative notes and doctor's orders that paint pictures of life that make the ordinary dramas and ups & downs of life seem positively inane.

There was one patient, and his wife, who took their anger at his poor condition, and I suspect some media brainwashing about the disgraceful state of the American medical community, out on us. When scheduled to visit once a week and we normally went out on Thursday but tried to go out on a Wednesday. This to them was proof that we were trying to defraud Medicare by making more visits than we were authorized. We were leaving more supplies than he immediately needed in the home in a conscious effort to overbill Medicare.

Then there was the patient who had left psychiatric care against medical advice and was a constant thorn in our side. One nurse was too fat, one was too old. Luckily we never tried to send a male nurse out there. He called us constantly demanding nursing visits he didn't really need, wheedled his insurance into demanding medical equipment he didn't really need. He was very manipulative and not terribly pleasant.

There are the patients who are clearly close to death, but the nurses list their life expectancy as 'greater than six months' two days before they pass away. These same patients refuse hospice care because going to hospice means accepting their own mortality.

Children, relatives and significant others display varying mixes of compassion, fear, anger, dominance and submission, often in almost the same breath.

And through it all, nurses faced with their own personal, health and life problems, bury it all inside so they can give the best possible care and comfort. They work insane hours, make themselves perpetually available to worried patients and their families and receive not horrible, but certainly substandard, pay. They are my new heroes.

And my life is a piece of piss in comparison to the diseases, injuries and sheer bad fortune most of our clients have experienced. I'm very lucky.