Dying with compassionate care

Editor's Notebook

There’s no doubt about it, we all are going to die one day. How, when or where we don’t know, but the reality of dying can be made infinitely better with the palliative care that hospice organizations are dedicated to providing.

November is national Hospice Month, a time to recognize the health care options that address the needs of the terminally ill.

We are fortunate to have two of those options right here in Clallam County: Assured Hospice of Clallam County and Volunteer Hospice of Clallam County.

Both are designed to support people in the last phases of illness, primarily in their homes. The care enables the terminally ill to live as comfortably and independently as possible until their death.

The needs of the entire family are addressed for those using hospice. 

From a historical perspective, hospice, which has the same linguistic root as hospitality, can be traced back to medieval times when it referred to a place of shelter and rest for weary or ill travelers on a long journey.

Dame Cicely Saunders, a physician who founded the first modern hospice in London, first applied hospice to the specialized care of dying patients in 1967.

Florence Wald, dean of the Yale University School of Nursing, started the Connecticut Hospice in 1974, the nation’s first home-care hospice program for the terminally ill.

Quite coincidentally, Wald died Nov. 8 at the age of 91.

But it was Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose book “On Death and Dying,” published in 1969, identified the five stages through which terminally ill patients progress and who made a plea for home care as opposed to treatment in an institutional setting.

The first hospice legislation was introduced in 1974 to provide federal funds for hospice programs. While that legislation did not pass, in 1982 Congress included a provision to create a Medicare hospice benefit. States are given the option of including hospice in their Medicaid programs and hospice care also is available to terminally ill nursing home residents.

There are now more than 3,000 hospice programs in the U.S. serving about 900,000 patients a year.

With two hospice options in Clallam County, there are double the opportunities. Assured Hospice serves around 250 patients a year and has 27 volunteers, while Volunteer Hospice serves between 225-250 patients per year and has about 100 volunteers.

The reason for the jump in volunteers between the two organizations is that Volunteer Hospice is incorporated as a nonprofit, no fees are charged and volunteers provide all services. Assured Hospice is a for-profit organization that accepts Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance payment.

One is not better than the other and yes, there is room for both in Clallam County. Both require backup from a physician. As the population continues to age, there will be more need for palliative care provided by the hospice health care option and we will be lucky to have the choices we have.

What’s important to remember during this month of hospice recognition is the compassionate care these agencies provide that enables the terminally ill to live as comfortably and independently as possible until their death.

It’s “Twilight” time

If it weren’t for our Forks neighbor, many of us living on the North Olympic Peninsula might not give the new movie “Twilight” a second thought, and just as many of us might not even know what it is.

But, the books turned movie have a history in tiny Forks, Wash. When writing the first “Twilight” book (there are now four in the series), author Stephenie Meyer, who lives in Phoenix, Ariz., wanted a setting that was, as she says, “ridiculously rainy.”

Well, with anywhere from 100 to 130 inches of rainfall a year, Forks is definitely “ridiculously rainy,” and so Forks it was. 

Meyer used other landmarks, such as the Hoh Rain Forest and LaPush.

Although the movie was not filmed in Forks, that hasn’t stopped a deluge of visitors to the eclectic town, most of them teenage girls wanting to capture the whole girl-falls-in-love-with-vampire imagery.

That’s what the books and movie are all about, by the way.

Teens are eating this up (not literally, although there is a good deal of vampire-fang showing throughout the movie).

Why?

As one 16-year-old girl, standing in a long line at a San Francisco event featuring “Twilight” stars, said, “It’s all about forbidden love. Edward (main character, the vampire) is so drawn to Bella (other main character, regular girl) he wants to love her and kill her. It’s those opposing forces.”

There you have it.

Some of us adults may not understand the connection, but the good news is books such as “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” have young people reading and talking about reading.

That’s a plus.

Another plus is that Forks, and to some extent Port Angeles and Sequim, have been able to take real economic advantage of the phenomenon known as “Twilight.”

“Twilight” the movie opens at the Lincoln Theater in Port Angeles on Nov. 21.

Mary Powell can be reached at editor@sequimgazette.com or at 683-3311.