{"id":37145,"date":"2021-07-09T01:44:34","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T08:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=37145"},"modified":"2021-07-07T16:05:54","modified_gmt":"2021-07-07T23:05:54","slug":"the-need-to-support-caregivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2021\/07\/09\/the-need-to-support-caregivers\/","title":{"rendered":"The need to support caregivers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rick Tash is the primary caregiver of his wife, Bambi Fass, who is dying of cancer. (still)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A new short film by Dr. Jessica Zitter and Kevin Gordon gives an intimate look at the toll involved in caring for a loved one at the end stages of their life.<\/p>\n

Zitter happened upon palliative care, she said, before \u201canyone even knew how to spell the word \u2018palliative,\u2019\u201d after she had \u201cfinally realized I\u2019d been feeling a lot of burning walls of stress in the way that I had been practising medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

A physician in Northern California, Zitter said, \u201cI\u2019d been treating patients like objects on a conveyor belt, instead of as people, and then began to practise, for the next two decades, palliative care and critical care at the same time, providing me with a strange vantage point within the world of medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was inspired to write and share stories about what\u2019s going on in hospitals, and about how we\u2019re treating the seriously ill among us \u2026 and I also continue practising medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zitter at first opted to educate the public via books, but then she encountered the power of film. \u201cI realized, all these messages I\u2019m trying to get across to people \u2013 about medical culture and about what we want to think about differently \u2013 they\u2019d lend themselves so well to film, to show the experience of the patient. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, I realized that a movie is worth much more than 1,000 pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photos<\/a>
Dr. Jessica Zitter and Kevin Gordon are directors of the short film Caregiver: A Love Story. (photos from Jessica Zitter)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the 24-minute Caregiver: A Love Story<\/em>, the audience meets a woman Zitter met at synagogue, Bambi Fass, and Fass\u2019s husband, Rick Tash. Fass was dying of cancer and Zitter offered palliative care, but was refused, until Fass\u2019s condition became dire.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe called me and she was extremely sick and had deteriorated,\u201d Zitter told the Independent<\/em>. \u201cShe said she needed help and, that day, we got her into hospice care. She was so, so sick and in so much pain and suffering. That day, her life turned around for the better. All of a sudden, she was living again.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is when Zitter asked Fass if she would be willing to be filmed. \u201cShe replied, \u2018I want to help someone else … if you want to write about me or anything.\u2019 She knew about my book. That\u2019s when we got a film crew. I thought the film would be about her, an amazing woman. What I didn\u2019t realize then is that it would actually end up being about her husband as the main focus. I thought he was just going to be the guy who opens the door for the hospital, but he ended up being a central character.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fass had sat a few rows in front of Zitter at their synagogue. \u201cShe had a long braid of hair,\u201d recalled Zitter. \u201cI\u2019d always see it from behind. I didn\u2019t know her really, but I did wonder…. She was very, very sick…. I knew she was, because she had brain metastasis. She was vivacious and funny. She was staring her death in the face and she still had a sense of humour. She was a hero, a really fascinating character.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took almost two years to put the movie together and to fully grasp the importance of sharing it with the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never realized \u2013 the invisible public health crisis, family caregiver burden \u2013 how much this story needed to be told,\u201d said Zitter. \u201cThe original intention I had for this film was to show how, once you make the right decision, everything will be OK\u2026. I then realized how na\u00efve that message was. It\u2019s not that easy. You can make decisions that feel like they\u2019re going to be the right choice for the patients, but will it be the right choice for the family as a whole? We have to be much more holistic when we think about our patients. It really needs to include our families as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven in a loving, caring and organized community like ours, we aren\u2019t necessarily focusing on and supporting the family caregivers among us,\u201d said Zitter. \u201cAnd there are a lot of family caregivers \u2013 rising numbers \u2013 with very little support. An organized community has been unable to attend to this man [Tash] who is deteriorating in front of our eyes, because they don\u2019t know what to do with him. We\u2019re not primed to think about caregiver burden as an urgent task.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zitter found that her synagogue had no committee to assist family caregivers, and her hospital community was also not paying attention to caregivers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re an invisible workforce that we don\u2019t pay attention to,\u201d said Zitter. \u201cWe don\u2019t attend to them, we don\u2019t think about them, we don\u2019t identify them, we don\u2019t include them in the conversation. But they\u2019re a huge part of our workforce … and we\u2019re just ignoring them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zitter\u2019s hope is that people from various communities, including synagogues, churches and mosques, will watch this movie and then establish a workshop for family caregivers and identify ways to support caregivers. To that end, she has created a keynote message and an hour-long program to raise awareness of this crisis and do something about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best place to start is at caregiveralovestory.com,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can go on the website and see public screenings that are coming up and other ways to watch the film yourself, whether bringing it to your organization or watching it privately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Currently, Zitter is working on a film about deathbed spirituality and prayer, as well as on a movie about Ethan Sisser, a Jewish Buddhist.<\/p>\n

\u201cEthan was an amazing, amazing guy,\u201d said Zitter. \u201cHe died about two or three months ago. He has a community following on social media. A lot of young people were just so moved by the way he viewed his death and the bravery and beauty of his final days…. We\u2019re making a film about him, which will be beautiful and, hopefully, you\u2019ll see that soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebeca Kuropatwa <\/strong>is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rick Tash is the primary caregiver of his wife, Bambi Fass, who is dying of cancer. (still) A new short film by Dr. Jessica Zitter and Kevin Gordon gives an intimate look at the toll involved in caring for a loved one at the end stages of their life. Zitter happened upon palliative care, she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37146,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[20711,2484,9559,3076,2864,8506,20712,20710],"class_list":["post-37145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-bambi-fass","tag-cancer","tag-caregiver","tag-education","tag-health","tag-jessica-zitter","tag-kevin-gordon","tag-rick-tash"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}