At Schiavo's Hospice, a Return to Routine

Washingtonpost ^ | June 18, 2005 | Ceci Connolly

[Smartaleck]

In rooms less than 25 feet apart, Young's 27-year-old son and Saviano's 48-year-old daughter are near the end. Like Terri Schiavo, the woman who died here about two months ago, they will live out their final hours in Hospice House Woodside.

"I can't believe this is happening to me," says Saviano, tears welling up, learning firsthand what hospice is when it isn't on the television, when it isn't in the courts.

Two months after the Schiavo case exposed an entire nation to one family's bitter battle with death, the hospice has returned to its normal rhythms. In the past 60 days, 129 new patients have arrived, 19 memorials have been held and 88 residents have died, each departing the way Schiavo left -- on a gurney, face uncovered, showing that at Woodside, death is not hidden.

Unlike this routine day, the staff has a name for the Schiavo period. They call it The Siege. The two-week sideshow of demonstrators, bomb threats, court rulings and political interventions.

Now -- liberated of the television cameras and police checkpoints, the pastor with the bullhorn and the life-size Jesus on a cross, Jesse Jackson and Randall Terry, the juggler and the monks -- the people of Woodside are back to the everyday business of dying. For all the chaos and emotion the Schiavo case elicited, it did not alter the fundamental nature of Woodside and the 3,200 hospices across the country. For 15 years, they have been the place where anyone, regardless of age, wealth, handicap or history, can find company on the way to death.

"I would watch volunteers feeding and bathing our patients day and night, and they're out there calling us murderers," she says, her voice piercing the 5 a.m. silence.

[Monterrosa-24]

The trend toward hospices has its negatives. I would prefer a dirty pauper's hospital than a hospice. What kind of "doctor" chooses to work at a hospice?

[Sola Veritas]

The only good thing I can think to say about a "hospice" is at least they are honest. People go there to die, and they don't attempt to conceal it (not that I approve). However, we have been sticking folks in "rest rooms" or "nursing homes" which are, for the most part, the same thing just not open about it.

[passionfruit]

"I would watch volunteers feeding and bathing our patients day and night, and they're out there calling us murderers,"

Terri wasn't dying until she was refused food and water.

[Howlin]

What kind of "doctor" chooses to work at a hospice?

The best people on the face of this earth.

[Smartaleck]

"What kind of "doctor" chooses to work at a hospice?"

Not sure. The article gives glimpses of those who work there...a need to comfort others I suppose.

[Smartaleck]

"Terri wasn't dying until she was refused food and water."

The article is for the most part about the others?

[Smartaleck]

"What kind of "doctor" chooses to work at a hospice?
The best people on the face of this earth."

Certainly special people. I suppose the question is akin to asking "what kind of people like mother Theresa would choose to live in wretched Calcutta"?

Some just see a need a fill it.

[texjan]

I have mixed feelings about hospice. My dad was recently diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and given two weeks to live. He was put in hospice to die--although he was unconscious the last 2-3 days, they kept increasing his morphine until he died. They kept saying he was in pain (no outward signs). I know he was going to die and I didn't want him in pain but it seems like they played God and hastened his death in the name of compassion.

[texjan]

Thanks for your condolences--I think you missed my point. Of course I didn't want him screaming in pain--as I said he never complained of pain and we all prayed that he would go quickly. I just had an uneasy feeling about all the morphine they were giving him--50 cc's every 3 hours.

[Monterrosa-24]

Mother Teresa worked for life. These hospice "doctors" who do not try to cure the sick are much more like the bespectacled Dr. Mengele and his "kindly smiles". Good doctors work to cure the sick, not just drug the dying. What horrid creatures are these employees at Woodside that so easily deny water to a patient.

[FreepinforTerri]

Today, the only visible reminder of it all is a three-foot-tall angel watching over the nurse's station on Beach Avenue, the wing where Schiavo lived for five years.

"To our angels at hospice who cared for us," reads the statue's brass plaque. "Thank you, Mike & Terri Schiavo."

Did you know about this? Can you ping the others?

[floriduh voter]

docs with malpractice suits work at some hospices. For information on good hospices: www.hospicepatients.org. They sort it all out so we don't have to.

Terri's hospice has a bad rep, well deserved.

[floriduh voter]

Cece Connelly, the author is a left winger who does the talk show circuit and I think is on Capital Gang on Saturday nights on CNN.

My neighbor was Terri's nurse at Palm Gardens. If there's anything I need to know, I can just ask her. She was very troubled that the State of Fla. killed her. She says Terri wasn't PVS. I believe her and all the docs who filed Affidavits that Terri could be rehabbed. Now I'm outta here because I see some baiters in here. Life is too short to get in tangles with them.

[sinkspur]

These hospice "doctors" who do not try to cure the sick are much more like the bespectacled Dr. Mengele and his "kindly smiles". Good doctors work to cure the sick, not just drug the dying.

You're a very ignorant person.

Hospice workers care for the dying and make things as comfortable as they can for them.

[floriduh voter]

Re: your post. It's ludicrous that Terri would be thanking Hospice for taking her life. Again, HINO is creating monuments to convince himself that it was her wish and not his, just like on the Nancy Cruzan type headstone that Terri is buried under.

HINO can carve on the side of a mountain that Terri died in Feb. of 1990 but it doesn't make it so.

He's having trouble convincing himself and who can blame him? I hate being used by attorneys myself. Poor HINO manipulated by attorneys who know how to game the system. Judge Greer's not being investigated, HINO is. Mark Fuhrman's book isn't about Judge Greer, it's about that night and HINO.

[floriduh voter]

Orlando ER was used for a reality show without patients' permission.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/florida/orl-loctraumasuit24062405jun24,0,3231025.story?coll=sfla-news-florida

[mountaineer]

For the past two months, Ledoux has been stuck in her own sort of netherworld, caught between her midlife calling to provide pastoral support to the dying and the public portrayal of Woodside as an unholy death chamber. Intellectually, she knows the "people out front were extremists," but she cannot reconcile how self-professed Christians -- many wearing robes -- could have been so "degrading, hurtful . . . misguided."

Indeed.