at the table
MODERATOR: PAT BRADFORD
Pat Bradford is the Wrightsville Beach Magazine
publisher and editor, and also serves in that
capacity for the
weekly community
newspaper, Lumina
News. Ms. Bradford
CAROLE GREEN: I know palliative
care is about comfort and alleviating
of suffering, but what are practical
components of that? You know, to
me that’s something to grow in our
culture because, I wonder, shouldn’t
palliative care be in every stage of our
lives?
DR. KAREN REICHOW: When
someone gets sick, they start having a
lot of medicine and very little palliative.
All palliative means is it’s all in pieces
— heart, mind and soul — all those
aspects are covered. As you get sicker,
you tend to have more medical, but
also hopefully more palliative. But at
the end of life, like all end-of-life care,
all of hospice is palliative, but not all
palliative care is hospice. Yes, we should
have those aspects of holistic care in all
the medicine that we have.
NICOLE FREEBOURN: When they come in, one of the first
things a lot of times they say is, ‘I don’t want to go to the hospital
anymore’ because they’ve been back and forth so many times, and
we say, ‘You don’t have to.’
BRETT BLIZZARD: Mother was at Davis for many years and had
is a founding
member of the
King’s Breakfast
outreach and
team leader of
The King’s
Ministry Team,
of Pine Valley
Church of
God. As such
she coordinates the church’s food assistance
outreach ministry, including monthly hot
meals for the LCFH&LCC. One beloved member
of her ministry team, Isabel Henry, was a patient
in the LCFH&LCC for five weeks, during
this past Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
28
WBM october 2013
some complications with knee surgery and
she ended up at Cape Fear ICU. Hospice
came in there because there was no room at
the inn at that point in time. Then a room
opened up and they asked me, ‘Would you
like to go to the care center?’ and I said,
‘Absolutely,’ because I had visited so many
friends there. I knew the place. We were
fortunate enough to have the last days with
mother there.
PAT BRADFORD: What’s the first
thing you would want someone to
know that had no knowledge at
all of what the hospice experience
was?
CHARLES LONG: How to engage the
service.
NICOLE FREEBOURN: We just need a
doctor’s order. Families will call the office
sometimes when they haven’t spoken to a
physician yet, or they just have seen their loved one decline or they’ve
been in and out of the hospital and say, ‘What do we need to do to
get hospice?’ A lot of times that’s the first: ‘Where do we start and
how do we find out more about it?’
DR. KAREN REICHOW: When you talk about palliative care,
end-of-life care, it’s many facets, the doctor is one piece; two