![\"RYAN](\"http:\/\/www.stanforddaily.com\/cgi-bin\/wp-content\/uploads\/fea010610noda-300x221.jpg\" "\\"RYAN")
She remembered the last time she saw him, in April at Gulfside Regional Hospice in Florida, fixed to his hospital bed with his muscles eaten away. At 79 years old, he could barely speak, but he was still awake and alert.<\/p>\nOn a Sunday afternoon, Heida Earnest sank into her living room couch at her home in Mountain View, Calif., counting down the days when she would see her father again.<\/p>\n
She remembered the last time she saw him, in April at Gulfside Regional Hospice in Florida, fixed to his hospital bed with his muscles eaten away. At 79 years old, he could barely speak, but he was still awake and alert.<\/p>\n
It was late June now, and in two days, she would be back at his bedside. She and her husband, Ian, had already booked their plane tickets, and she had scheduled a few days off from work.<\/p>\n
But Heida and her husband never boarded their Tuesday flight.<\/p>\n
The shrill ring of the telephone pierced the afternoon silence. Heida picked up, and a nurse from her father\u2019s hospice quickly identified herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s your dad,\u201d said the nurse. \u201cHe wants to talk to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heida was immediately concerned, wondering why this nurse was talking for her dad, especially after holding a seemingly normal conversation with him the day before.<\/p>\n
\u201cHello, Dad?\u201d she said.
\nNo response.<\/p>\n
\u201cDad, hang on,\u201d Heida said. \u201cIan and I will be there on Tuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n
Again, nothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything\u2019s going to be O.K.,\u201d she finished. \u201cI love you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rustling and crackling of the phone on the other side interrupted the conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour father just passed,\u201d the nurse said and hung up, leaving Heida to the monotonous dial tone.<\/p>\n
She sat on her couch perplexed and, after waiting 10 minutes, called back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is James Hall\u2019s daughter,\u201d Heida said calmly. \u201cDid he just die?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, he did, and he heard your voice,\u201d the nurse responded. \u201cYour voice was the last thing he heard.\u201d<\/p>\n
A year and a half later, sitting in the basement offices of Stanford Hospital\u2019s Spiritual Care Services, Heida Earnest still finds that call hard to accept. She is a soft-spoken woman with large, bright eyes. As she speaks, her voice barely rises above a whisper, and she pauses occasionally to collect herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a funny kind of a thing, because in your mind you know it\u2019s coming,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know it\u2019s coming, but when it happens, it\u2019s always disbelief. It\u2019s very strange.\u201d<\/p>\n
After she hung up the phone, it took a few hours for the pain to hit. Then it came in waves \u2014 an \u201cunbelievably profound sadness.\u201d Still, she is thankful she was able to talk to her father in his last moments and that he was not alone, but surrounded by nurses and doctors.<\/p>\n
At Stanford Hospital, 600 to 700 people die every year. Of those, about five percent die alone \u2014 some 40 people left to face death in their hospital beds by themselves.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, they are the sick and elderly who no longer have families. Other times, they are like Heida\u2019s father \u2014 patients whose families are in some other part of the country and can\u2019t make it to their loved ones in time. Whatever the reason, the patients are left in the care of the hospital, where the hustle and bustle of staff duties can prevent someone from being at their bedside at all times.<\/p>\n
So, when Heida uncovered a binder with a new program in the Spiritual Care offices last February, she was immediately intrigued. \u201cNo One Dies Alone,\u201d she read, flipping through the hodgepodge of papers on \u201cthe dying process\u201d and \u201cproviding a caring presence.\u201d<\/p>\n
She asked the Reverend Susan Scott, the decedent care chaplain, what it was all about. No One Dies Alone would be a volunteer program launched by Spiritual Care Services in April, she was told, to provide company for patients who didn\u2019t want to face the end of their lives alone. Heida joined immediately.<\/p>\n
In the same binder that Heida found on Reverend Scott\u2019s desk was \u201cThe Dying Person\u2019s Bill of Rights.\u201d Created by a Michigan nurse more than 30 years ago, it outlines 16 rights that an individual should be afforded while dying. Right #7, printed in bold, is the foundation of Stanford\u2019s new volunteer program: \u201cI have the right not to die alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
This idea sat in the back of Sandra Clarke\u2019s mind for 16 years, after she left the side of a dying man as a nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eugene, Ore. The man had asked her to sit with him in the Intensive Care Unit in his last moments, and she promised him that she would, just as soon as she finished checking on other patients. He died before she returned an hour and a half later.<\/p>\n
Now retired, Sandra remembers the burden she carried after that night in 1986.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe asked for dignity and respect . . . and the simple fact that a nurse on duty could not be there for him \u2014 I thought this was just wrong,\u201d she said.\u201cIf he had needed machines or medication, that would have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
She vowed to ensure that this same situation would never happen again, and in 2001, she launched the first No One Dies Alone program with Sacred Heart. From the start, Sandra never intended the program to provide medical attention to its patients. Instead, she focused on the basic human needs of individual patients, with care as simple as waiting at the bedside or providing a hand to hold.<\/p>\n
After establishing the first No One Dies Alone organization, Sandra developed an extensive manual, teaching other hospital staffs how to start programs of their own. She did not copyright the material and name in order to allow for open dissemination, and she has shipped more than 1,500 copies around the world \u2014 from Alaska to France to Singapore.<\/p>\n
Seven years later, a copy found its way into the hands of Susan Scott. After receiving approval and structuring a program around Clarke\u2019s manual, Scott began Stanford Hospital\u2019s No One Dies Alone program in April.<\/p>\n
No One Dies Alone volunteers are strictly on call \u2014 they sign up for two-hour shifts in which they are available during the week and are only called if the program receives a patient. Heida signed up for any open 3 p.m. shift on weekdays, so that if she were called, she could make her way to the hospital quickly from her job at Stanford\u2019s medical library. She didn\u2019t expect that she would be phoned within weeks of signing up.<\/p>\n
On a late April afternoon, she entered a first-floor hospital room to find a woman, eyes shut, propped up in a hospital bed. Light flowed in through an open window, basking her in a warm light as she lay peacefully. A woman singing and playing a Celtic harp accompanied the patient.<\/p>\n
Heida placed down her things, including a program-provided bag filled with poetry books and a music player, and glanced at the patient with whom she would be spending the next two hours. Remembering her training, Heida introduced herself even though the patient kept her eyes closed \u2014 she never opened them in those two hours.<\/p>\n
Penny Barrett, a long-time volunteer with Spiritual Care Services, had sat with the patient some eight hours before Heida on the inaugural shift of the program, and had given the woman a nickname.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was nothing scary about it, the patient had a great sense of peace and innocence and there was a childlike characteristic for a person in her 90s,\u201d Barrett said. \u201cHer hair was short and . . . I thought of Peter Pan.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gathering herself, Heida read through Peter Pan Lady\u2019s files, reciting her name and diagnosis. There was nobody in the area to look after her because her family lived on the East Coast.<\/p>\n
Heida sat in a bedside chair next to the woman and clasped the woman\u2019s hand in her own. As doctors moved in an out of the room, and the Celtic harp player left for other duties, Heida remained the one constant.<\/p>\n
Since Peter Pan Lady, Heida has sat with three other patients, each with a unique nickname and experience.\u00a0 There was Mr. Verbal, a man transitioning to hospice care, who couldn\u2019t stop talking \u2014 a rarity given that most of the patients in the program no longer have the capacity to speak.<\/p>\n
An atheist, Mr. Verbal questioned Heida, a devout Catholic, about her religion. He wanted to know where she had traveled and what she did for a living. But their conversations were broken by bouts of sleep that overcame the patient.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know why I keep falling asleep the way I do,\u201d he said before nodding off.<\/p>\n
Then there was Thirsty Woman, hospitalized in Stanford\u2019s ICU. Heida spent two hours with her on a Saturday night holding a pink sponge that she used to soak in water and dab the mouth of the patient. Thirsty Woman could barely speak.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the whole time, I just gave her water,\u201d Heida said. \u201cShe just drank and drank and drank.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her most recent patient was Big Man, an unresponsive man suffering from heart disease. She spent most of that time working with a new volunteer who had just joined the program.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a month since Heida sat with her last patient, and she doesn\u2019t often think about any of the patients she\u2019s been with. The volunteers are not expected to dwell on the subject of their previous patient\u2019s conditions and are not usually notified if a patient they had been with has died on a later shift. Despite the intimate nature of the program, volunteers are expected to maintain a certain emotional distance from their patients, especially after leaving the room.<\/p>\n
But by sitting with fellow human beings in their last moments of life, how could one not develop a personal connection to the dying? Isn\u2019t there at least a sense of wanting to know? Heida only heard of Thirsty Woman\u2019s death through Reverend Scott.<\/p>\n
When asked if she knew whether Mr. Verbal or Big Man had died, she whispered, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014 Part two will run in tomorrow\u2019s issue of The Daily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On a Sunday afternoon, Heida Earnest sank into her living room couch at her home in Mountain View, Calif., counting down the days when she would see her father again. She remembered the last time she saw him, in April at Gulfside Regional Hospice in Florida, fixed to his hospital bed with his muscles eaten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}