Macon Magazine

Hospice offering comfort and overcoming misconceptions

By Mary-Frances Burt

Jim Scheiman held his daughter, Ashley, in his arms and listened to her breathing. The 4-year-old had insisted he hold her until she fell asleep. Jim was tired, but he knew his job would take him out of town again. He did not know if Ashley would be there when he got back.

Six months earlier, before her adoption, Ashley had climbed into her foster mother’s lap asking for ice and a band-aid. Until that day she had never complained of being hurt or ill.

“Right away I knew something was wrong,” said Evelyn Scheiman. Jim took the child to the doctor and insisted they run tests. After the X-rays came in Ashley was sent immediately to the emergency room at The Medical Center of Central Georgia. Jim remembers being shown Ashley’s films and not yet understanding what he was seeing. The doctor said, “We stopped counting at 100.” Ashley’s lungs and liver were covered with tumors. “It looked like chicken pox,” Jim recalled.

At Egleston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta, Ashley underwent chemotherapy. When her numbers showed that her body was no longer responding to chemotherapy, the Scheimans had to make the heartbreaking decision to stop treatment. Having a high quality of life for Ashley became the priority.

Ashley was the Scheimans’ youngest foster child. Jim and Evelyn had applied to adopt Ashley and her three siblings in 2002. After the doctors decided no more could be done medically for Ashley, the Scheimans received a call saying the adoptions were approved.

“We had waited so long,” Evelyn recalled, “and now it was finally going to happen.” The couple knew the moment they signed the papers they would be solely responsible for Ashley’s medical care, and at this point Ashley needed care round-the-clock. “Someone told us to call hospice,” Evelyn said.

Like so many people, the Scheimans really had no idea what hospice was and how it could help them at this difficult point in their lives. Most of us have heard of hospice, but few of us really understand the hospice concept and how significant it can be to someone who is terminally ill. An important thing to remember and understand is that hospice treats the person, not the disease, a crucial mission when curing is no longer an option. Comfort care, known as palliative care, becomes the focus. Controlling pain and treating symptoms allow a person to live life as fully as possible. By affirming life while at the same time regarding the end of life as a normal process, hospice helps people through the most important transition they ever encounter.

A person is eligible for hospice when the physician states the person has six months or less to live and that medical intervention is no longer beneficial.

Too few Americans entering life’s final phase are availing themselves of high-quality hospice care, experts say. The situation is only going to become more problematic as the nation’s baby boomers reach the end of their expected life spans in coming decades, according to two recent articles in the New England Journal of Medicine.