Hospice of Visiting Nurse Service (Hospice & Palliative Care)
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A Perfect Ending and Beginning
Dan Donnelly, an 84-year-old Cuyahoga Falls resident, husband of 61 years and
father of five, battled against pancreas cancer for three and a half months. He
was going in and out of Akron General Medical Center and a nursing facility.
Dan’s daughter, Maureen “Mimi” Hunt, desperately wanted to help her dad meet his
goal to live to 90, but the battle his body was fighting was taking a toll. She
wasn’t sure what the best option was – that is until a Hospice of Visiting Nurse
Service (VNS) Community Liaison told the family about hospice care. Hospice care
can be an ideal choice for persons like Dan, who are in the last phases of an
illness, so that they may live as fully and as comfortably as possible. On the
community liaison’s suggestion, Mimi visited the Hospice of VNS Care Center. “It
was like I was in a different world. It was an answer for us,” Mimi explains. “I
saw it as an opportunity to be able to give my dad back a perfect ending, and a
perfect beginning,” Mimi added.
Upon settling in at the Care Center, the family saw almost immediate improvement
in his spirits. “From the moment he came to hospice, by the time I handled the
paperwork and went to see him, he was his sweet, warm, charming, genuine self,”
Mimi said. Dan’s wife, Emalee, was by his side every night. “I spent all night
with him – they would make up the bed for me and then they would push Dan’s bed
over close and I could just reach over and grab his hand, and he would grab mine
and squeeze it, and he would go to sleep saying, ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘Dan, I
love you too,’” Emalee shares. Dan spent the last six days of his life at the
Hospice Care Center.
Hospice Care Comes Home
Two months after her husband died, Emalee Donnelly was
diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. She had a complete hysterectomy at
AGMC and declined chemotherapy. Instead, Emalee turned to Hospice of VNS for
home hospice care because she wanted quality of life, as her husband had in his
final days. She wanted to go home and enjoy her family, she wanted to continue
sewing baby blankets, she wanted to sit and look out at her gardens.
“We really,
really wanted mom to have a quality life, to have whatever time that was,
however long that would be – if that would be 10 years, if it would be 10
months, if it would be 10 days,” Mimi says. Hospice care in her home provided
Emalee with physical therapy, home health aide visits twice a week to help with
personal care, visits from an oncology and pain management nurse regularly, home
delivered medications, and medical equipment such as an oxygen concentrator, a
hospital bed, and a wheeled walker. The Medicare hospice benefit covers all of
this care related to her life-limiting diagnosis at no additional cost to
Emalee, just as it also did for her husband.
Emalee thought she had only three
days left to live when she left AGMC. In turn, she received hospice care for
four and a half months while being active around the house with her cane, doing
the dishes, staying up late with her son-in-law to watch the Cavaliers play (a
newly learned passion), and sewing receiving blankets. Emalee passed away on
March 28, 2009, after prolonged life enhanced by Hospice.
“Hospice is the answer
to the old time care that people got that I remember my mother telling about how
wonderful it was,” Emalee said.