Beginning in June, Hospice Compassus offers Healing Touch and Aromatherapy as part of its Tapestries program, which aims at providing additional comfort measures to patients at the end of their lives. The practitioner providing these complementary therapies is Donna Adams, an oncology and hospice nurse, as well as a healing touch certified practitioner and instructor.
Adams explained her work is “based on [Albert] Einstein’s premise that everything is energy and that we are energetic beings having a human experience.”
“This is just our house that we live in, this physical body that we have, and so each one of us is capable of working within each other’s energy fields and we are capable of working with our own energy fields,” she said. Energy medicine’s intentions are set to the patients’ highest good, which for hospice patients means helping them ease into the dying process through comfort measures — be it alleviating their pain or decreasing their depression or anxiety about death, as well as assisting them to make a spiritual connection.
“I think end of life is very beautiful and to be able to support people through end of life care is very important because we weren’t taught in school that death and dying is going to occur and many individuals are afraid of it, so to be able to go in and have that dialogue and provide these types of comfort measures to the patients really is very important, to help them ease into the process of leaving this earthly plane,” Adams said.
After spending years “building dream homes in the Chicagoland area,” Adams turned to nursing after a loss. In 2000, her husband died of colon cancer and she fulfilled a promise of getting certified and moving to south Florida, where her family is from. Ten years later, she traveled to Sedona as a way to find herself and let go.
“I came here and I fell in love with it. I just fell in love with the beauty, I was deeply connected with the different vortexes, really,” Adams explained. “I had a spiritual guide that took me to Bell Rock on a hike and as I stood up on Bell Rock midway with my arms out stretched, I could see the energy field moving back and forth across. And so I asked her about it, and she said to me, ‘Congratulations, you can see the energy field,’ and that moment in time was when I heard, you need to continue to get your certification as a healing touch certified practitioner.”
So she did just that — and of course kept coming back to the place that helped her. While the first trips were just as a tourist, Adams wanted to move. The right time came in 2017, when Arizona Oncology asked her to join its team as a Clinic Nursing Supervisor. A couple years later, Adams is also part of Northern Arizona Healthcare’s oncology clinic and works as a pre- and post-op nurse at a surgical center, all the while seeing patients at Hospice Compassus and in her private practice in the Village of Oak Creek.
“I’m doing what I love and I’m enjoying it,” she said. “I love it because the feedback and the responses are beautiful and I love making a difference in people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s the best reward in the world, to make that difference and see that difference occur — and it’s important as a human being, we’re interacting with others, that’s what we do. It’s about compassion and kindness and love.” In just a couple weeks at the hospice, Adams said she’s seen around 14 patients. For her, it is related to people’s needs to find ways to heal and feel more grounded as a complement to conventional medicine.
“My fondest wish is that conventional medicine will really become much more open to allowing holistic, complementary and integrative as a part of the regular care for patients and families. It should be that way, it should be integrated,” Adams said. “Insurance should be paying for wellness and not just disease.”
“When I see a client, I don’t deter them from seeing a conventional medicine practitioner, this complements,” she continued. “With the complementary and integrative medicine therapies, there really can be no harm because, number one, with the healing touch and aromatherapies that I work with, the intention is set for the highest good of the individual, they’re not ingesting anything, my hands are used either on the body or above the body, so it doesn’t cost anything, there’s no invasive treatment.”
To highlight how her therapies helped patients at the end of their lives, Adams told about a woman she saw who was having difficulty transitioning. Adams went to see her and, with permission from the husband and daughter, conducted a chakra spread, which she described as “one of the most beautiful modalities of the healing touch program because it helps people transition on this earthly plane into whatever it is they’re experiencing … but it also helps them transition and opens them up spiritually to transition up into the heavens when they’re ready to leave.”
The patient passed the night after her session, which she said stunned one of her colleagues, who asked her, “What’s the opposite of Grim Reaper?”
“That would be the Angel of Mercy,” another colleague replied.
“I looked at her and I said, ‘Why are you asking me that?’” Adams explained, saying the colleague proceeded to tell her the patient had died and she didn’t know what to call her.
“I said, ‘You call me Donna Adams. That’s who I am.’”
