Did you ever want to fly with Peter Pan when you were a child? Well, Christine Johnson did and she delighted in helping make the dream more visible for the children of McDowell County. She helped build sets, make costumes, and apply makeup to the actors when Foothills Community Theatre performed the play.

Christine is not happy unless she can keep busy and loves to have people around to talk to. She has a loving family and is especially proud of her two grandsons, but the family can’t be with her all the time. After she had surgery and chemo, her son had to take over 3 months off from work to stay with her. When he went back to work, she was alone a lot of the time for 3 weeks. She said, “I was about to go crazy with nothing but the TV and four walls”.

Mrs. Johnson looks forward to the nurse visiting two to three times a week.

When a good friend told her husband about hospice care and her doctor agreed, Christine had terrible visions of having to spend the nights in some awful institution and other vividly imagined fears. In fact, her anxiety level was so high; she didn’t want the hospice people to come in her house that day. To her amazement, the nurse held her hand and the family resource person was so nice, that she later thought, “I would have gone with them by the time they left”. She said that she now feels so much more at ease since she has been getting hospice care

A good part of Christine’s greatly reduced level of anxiety has been the visits by hospice volunteers. One is teaching her how to crochet and make angels, however she says that they sometimes talk so much that they don’t get much of their knitting done. Others are keeping her busy with canvas art and making suncatchers.

Even though she had a lot of health problems, Christine had to work at a fast-food restaurant to pay for her $6,000 per year medicine bill. She said, “People don’t know how rough it was”. Now hospice pays for her medications and medical equipment that are related to her diagnosis. Like most people, they were not aware of this benefit of hospice care, but she and her husband say that it has been a true blessing to the Johnson family. Friends in the community tell her to hurry back to work so they can enjoy her good biscuits in the morning.

Christine says that her nurse is very nice as well as being a really good nurse. She said, “My nurse is so compassionate that she can’t stand it if she thinks I feel bad.” It also helps that the nurse does her lab work, saving her from trips to her doctor’s office. The family resource person has been very attentive, even coming to see her on Saturdays, and they brought a cake and a yellow rose on their 54th wedding anniversary. She exclaimed, “I love him to death”, at the mention of the hospice chaplain, and she couldn’t believe that the nurse assistant came right on time during a snowstorm. “In fact, all of the hospice staff are good people”, according to Christine.

With the support and encouragement of those “people”, Christine has been able to keep anxiety from dominating her days, and those days are better quality ones. She has worked hard to learn how to walk again after being bedridden so long, and is able to get around the house on her own and even attend church.