Nine years of working night shifts in hospice care taught me something I’ll never forget: People nearing the end of their lives rarely ask for the things you’d expect. Sometimes, they don’t ask for God. They don’t ask for miracles. Sometimes, they ask for something so small it breaks your heart. Room 4 belonged to an 86-year-old man named Walter. He had lung cancer. His wife, Dorothy, had died in 2019, and he hadn’t had a single visitor in eleven days. One night, around 2 a.m., he waved me over. “Are you married?” he asked. “No,” I told him. He nodded slowly. “Then you probably don’t wear perfume.” I smiled and told him I had some in my locker. “What kind?” “Nothing fancy. Just something cheap from the drugstore.” He shook his head. “Dorothy wore White Shoulders. Every night before bed. Not for church. For bed.” He chuckled, but the laughter quickly turned into a coughing fit. When he finally caught his breath, he looked at the ceiling and said something I still think about. “I used to tell her she was wasting it on me. She’d say, ‘The good stuff isn't for God. It’s for whoever has to look at you in the morning.’” Then he smiled. Not the polite smile people give strangers. The kind that belongs to someone remembering the best years of his life. I finished my shift at seven that morning, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dorothy. So I drove to three different pharmacies until I finally found a bottle of White Shoulders. It was tucked on the bottom shelf, behind the nail polish remover. $18.99. That evening, on my night off, I went back to the hospice. Walter was asleep. I didn’t wake him. I sprayed a little perfume on the inside of his pillowcase, then sprayed a washcloth and gently folded it across his chest. I sat beside him for a while. He never opened his eyes. But slowly, almost painfully slowly, his hand rose from the blanket. He reached for the washcloth and rested his palm flat against it. Then he held it there. His breathing softened. His face relaxed. For the first time in days, the tension seemed to leave his body. I've watched many people die over the years. Nurses learn to recognize the moments when someone stops struggling against what is coming. That night, I watched Walter settle into a memory that was bigger than the room he was lying in. Maybe he was remembering Dorothy getting ready for bed. Maybe he was remembering the way she smelled when she climbed beside him. Maybe, for a few precious minutes, he wasn't an 86-year-old man dying alone. Maybe he was simply a husband lying next to his wife again. Walter passed away on Thursday morning. Nobody came to collect his belongings. His room was cleaned, his bed was remade, and eventually another patient moved in. The world kept going, as it always does. But I never forgot him. People think hospice care is about managing pain, administering medication, and making someone comfortable during their final days. And yes, it is. But sometimes, comfort isn't a medication. Sometimes, it's a familiar song. A voice you haven't heard in years. A hand holding yours when the room goes quiet. Or the smell of the person you loved most in the world. We spend our entire lives building what we call home. We fill it with furniture, photographs, clothes, and all the ordinary things we barely notice until they're gone. But when everything else is stripped away, home can become something incredibly small. A familiar scent. A remembered touch. A voice saying your name. Sometimes, home is the person you keep expecting to find beside you when you wake up. And sometimes, when you can't bring that person back, the kindest thing another human being can do is help you remember them one last time. I've worked nine years of night shifts in hospice care. If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: At the end of life, people don't always need someone to save them. Sometimes, they just need someone to remind them that they were loved.

The word hero is used a lot these days. But, these two young women are heroes in every sense of the word 💗 Kelsey Pirie and Emma Brown were attending a friend's wedding, when they heard screams coming from a nearby country park. The girls, who are both nurses at a Welsh hospital, instantly took action. Still dressed in their wedidng clothes, they kicked off their heels and ran over to where the screams were coming from. As they arrived, they realised the severity of the situation. A three-year-old boy had been pulled from a pond and wasn't breathing. Kelsey and Emma immediately took over and despite being adult care nurses with no previous experience of performing CPR on children, their professional instincts kicked in. They spent five minutes attempting to resuscitate the boy, who initially had no pulse. Kelsey said: “We don’t know how long he had been in the water but he was unresponsive and there were no signs of life. He had no pulse. I started doing chest compressions and Emma started giving rescue breaths.” Emma added: “It was difficult due to the amount of water, but after about five minutes he started breathing.” Paramedics and an air ambulance arrived at the scene and transported the little boy to hospital, while Kelsey and Emma, adrenaline still going, returned to the wedding. “We didn’t really have a chance to process it; we had to snap back into wedding mode. I’m so thankful it was all ok," Emma said, adding: “If it had happened 10 minutes later we would have been inside for the ceremony and might not ever have knownwhat was going on." The three-year-old boy was taken to hospital and is in a stable condition - no doubt thanks to the brave actions of these two amazing girls that day ❤️ Emma and Kelsey, and another gentleman, Stefan Johnson who first pulled the three year-old from the water, have now been nominated by South Wales Police for a bravery award from the Royal Humane Society for their courage in saving his life. Right place. Right time. Right people. Absolute heroes 🙏❤️