Once you have had experience with a good hospice program, you never forget it . . . ever. And you always appreciate the job it does. Yet, it is a fairly new concept in American medical care, and when Karoline Carney at the Noble branch at Parkview Home Health and Hospice hears about an article on the program, she remarks, “Good, so many people don’t know what we do.”
I am going to be very blunt: Hospice services allow people to live as comfortably as possible in their homes while they are dying; it concentrates on quality of life and on the act of living itself while patients go through this business of saying goodbye.
Yes, it may not seem at first to be a topic that is anything but sad, but that’s not true. Hospice can give so much more than symptomatic relief and comfort; it can provide opportunities – to be with family, to participate in friendships, to give caregivers a bit of a respite.
Ann Hosted of rural Brimfield knows all about this; she has lived it. Her husband Paul – “but everyone called him Pete” – was a Hospice patient from mid-October of 2006 until May 11th of this year.
She talks about it, calling the illness a long siege. She says Pete had shingles for 2 ½ years and that the pain was terrific. When he was in the hospital beginning October 1, 2006, he was on oxygen 24/7 and a nursing home seemed to be the next step.
But that was not where he wanted to go. She says, “I said we can live with that . . . We can live with you being on oxygen. If you want to go home; we’re going home.” You hear the determination in her voice as she recalls that moment.
“The hospital would not release him until everything was set up at home – hospital bed and table, oxygen machine, bedside commode, sheets . . . everything. Our daughter called and said Hospice had brought all this to our house and he could come home.
“So we brought him home.”
She calls the nurses and aides “the girls” – her voice carries affection for them: “The girls were here when we got home and they were with us the whole time from when we left the hospital until he passed away.”
Talking about the schedule, she says, “Aides came on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the nurses on Monday and Thursday.” And, of course, they were never more than a phone call away.
“Ken (Weaver) came quite often to visit – the preacher with Hospice. Ken, the girls, all of them . . . you couldn’t ask for a better crew. They took care of him like he was one of their own.”
And that “taking care of” part was more than procedures and whatever. It was actually caring and interaction. Ann remembers Linda Yoder: “She would get down on her knees right by his chair and shake her finger at him and she would say, ‘Well, Pete, you have to do this and you have to do that.’ He believed every word she told him; he would take it from her, not from me.” She chuckles at the memory.
“Pete was in a lot of pain most of the time and they really regulated his pain medicine, and Linda really, really took good care of him in the medication field of it. I don’t know what I would have done without them.”
They cared about her as well. She says, “It (Hospice) really helped me to get away for a little bit – not that I didn’t want to be with him – but Linda told me, ‘You have to go on with your life too.’”
So, for instance, on Wednesday mornings, she knew either Joyce or Judy would be there when she left and that her daughter would be coming up from Avilla. “He was never alone for very long at all.”
The months moved on.
“He was in a lot of pain – his oxygen level – he could get maybe 15% oxygen in the end, they said.”
On May 11th, she and Pete were sitting at the table at suppertime. He had told her he didn’t want much to eat, so she made him a sandwich and brought something to drink.
She tells what happened then: “He said, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” and I said, ‘Okay, go in and sit in your lazy boy.’ So we were in there. I was right here by him and I had my hand on his heart and it was going so fast . . . he was trying to breathe so hard. I gave him a shot of the medicine that Linda said I could put in his breathing machine.
“He said, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and I said, ‘Well, just lie back a little bit . . . his heart was going so hard and he opened his eyes and tried to say something and them his heart stopped and I knew he was gone.”
He passed away about 8:30 on the evening of May 11, 2007.
“Linda told me, ‘He was where he wanted to be and he was with you – and that’s what he wanted.’”
But, you see, because of hospice, passing away in the evening wasn’t the only thing he did that day. And that is very important. Ann tells the story of that afternoon:
“He wanted to go down to our daughter’s house in Avilla – they raise Belgian horses – and he wanted to go down and see the two little babies. On (that) Friday, he said, ‘Let’s go down there and I said okay, so we went down. He sat there on the porch and talked to his daughter and I went around with my granddaughter. And he said, ‘I want to go down and see (one of the baby horses)’ so I and backed up the truck and he saw the baby and mama and we got home about five thirty.
Then the evening happened. Ann says, “My older son called my daughter Amy, and she said, ‘He can’t be dead; he was just at my house.’”
Ann then wonders, “Well, I don’t know what effort he put in it to go down and see her . . . I said, ‘Well, you have a good memory, Amy; he made an effort to come down and see you.”
She continues, ”He went to our other son’s to see him; he went to see Amy; and he would go over to the barn – just around the corner, the home place – and visit our older son . . . He couldn’t have done that if he had been in a nursing home. That’s another praise for Hospice – that he was capable of going and doing these things with his kids before he died.”
As for the people in Hospice who had cared for him, Ann says, “He thoroughly enjoyed all of the people and when he passed away, it was very hard. Some of them got to know him quite well – Linda, she had quite a time . . . “
She pauses and says, “I don’t know how I could have done without them; they are a bunch of wonderful, wonderful people and it takes special people to do this work.” After another pause, she says, “So that’s all I can tell, you.”
Well, I guess that’s great big “all” – encompassing so much: family, friends and community.
Noble County has been their community all their lives. Ann says, “My kids all went to school at Rome City and then went into East Noble and most of my grandkids did too.” All together, she and Pete have three children – two boys and one girl – and eight grandchildren.
Speaking of being the runt in a family of six-footers, Ann says, “I love them all and I don’t know what I would do without them. They are all special to me; I’m like my grandma said: “Every cow thinks her calf is the cutest.”
She chuckles and goes on, “I don’t know maybe I’m prejudices but they are all pretty special to me, grandkids and kids.
They are her future – along with her own interests.
She’s one of the Brimfield Methodist ladies of Apple Festival Beef & Noodle fame. This year she says they made noodles and cracked 5,050 eggs in two days, and she adds with a laugh, “That’s a lot of eggs.”
She will also be speaking at the Festival of Trees, the fundraiser for Hospice. “Jenny (Weigold, Hospice coordinator) said they debated asking me to speak because it is not long since he died. I asked her to let me think about it and I called and said, ‘I guess I could because I know how I feel about Hospice – nothing but good things about them and their work. I’ll say what I can and if I don’t say the right thing you can always yank me off the stage.”
Well, she’ll tell it like it is . . . and that will be just fine.