Lorie Grossman was on her volunteer shift at the Northwestern Memorial Hospice Program a few months ago when a patient became angry.
Grossman and the nurses tried to calm the woman, but to no avail. She continued to complain loudly, creating a disturbance on the 10-bed unit.
A target of her fury was the hospital food. Staffers finally were able to console her by ordering a pizza from a neighborhood restaurant. The gesture pleased and soothed her. She apologized for her behavior and offered to share the pizza.
“It’s easy to have a bad day when there are tubes sticking out of you and sores are in your mouth and your teeth are falling out,” Grossman says.
Grossman, 45, who was widowed eight years ago, has offered comfort and friendship to the terminally ill and their families for about three years. She spends several hours a week on the inpatient unit or in patients’ homes. She talks, listens, plays games, watches movies and helps in many other ways to let the grieving know they aren’t alone.
“When you’re dying, the little things make so much difference,” she says.
For example, she sometimes gives manicures to patients. “It’s a very warm, personal experience for them-especially for patients with AIDS because so many people don’t want to touch them,” she says.
The hospice, 303 E. Superior St., strives to help patients live as fully and comfortably as possible for the time they have left, says John DeBerry, coordinator of volunteers and bereavement.
“Our focus is to live until we die,” DeBarry says. “We’re here to provide compassionate, supportive care to help you and your family-whether biological or chosen-accomplish that.”
Volunteers are accepted after undergoing an interview and attending a five-session seminar that covers subjects such as the hospice philosophy, communication techniques and spirituality. Their first assignments are usually in the inpatient unit.
“You learn how to give baths, change beds and where the supplies are,” Grossman says. “You learn how to talk to someone who is dying. You don’t bounce into the room and say, `How are you doing?’ But you might say, `How is the day going?’ “
In her first few months, Grossman befriended a woman with lung cancer. The patient, who needed a wheelchair to get around, became well enough to go home. Grossman visited her there, and sometimes the two played cards.
Occasionally the woman asked to be wheeled to the lobby of her building or to the park across the street so she could smoke a cigarette. Grossman obliged because she didn’t see any harm in it at that stage of the patient’s life. “She was dying. Her doctors knew she smoked, but she didn’t want her daughter to know.”
Grossman’s favorite patient was a 70-year-old attorney and bachelor who regaled her with tales of his work as a civil rights activist. Together they occasionally reread old copies of letters to editors he had written.
“I can’t generalize, but sometimes people who are dying tend to be very open and want to talk about their lives and go over them,” she says. This patient had been “like that all his life. He was a great storyteller.”
“Lorie is loving, Lorie is giving, Lorie is devoted and dedicated,” DeBerry says. “She’s here because she chooses to be here to do this kind of work.”
“I like doing it,” Grossman says. “I like the ambience of the hospice floor, and I like going to someone’s home. People are so appreciative of anything you do. They are so happy to see someone with a warm, friendly face.”
Grossman, who has held jobs in retailing and marketing, is a personal shopper and wardrobe consultant. She grew up on the Southeast Side, graduated in 1967 from the now defunct Faulkner School for Girls in Chicago and studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for two years.
She then moved to Key West, where she married, had a son and was divorced. She returned to Chicago and remarried in 1984. Her second husband, Michael, died two years later at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
The multidisciplinary hospice program offers physical, emotional and spiritual assistance and respite for caregivers.
It was founded in 1982, and the inpatient unit, a homelike environment where friends and family members may stay 24 hours a day, was established in 1987. Patients who must be hospitalized for pain control or symptom management have the choice of staying in a regular hospital unit or in the hospice unit. The facilities include a quiet library and a large family room with television, piano and lounge furniture. Pets and children are welcome to visit.
Last year, the hospice served about 400 patients whose ages ranged roughly from 5 to 95. The average caseload at present is about 50. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome and cancer are the most common diseases.
The 35-member staff includes physicians, nurses, occupational therapists, a social worker and a chaplain. They are assisted by about 50 volunteers.
The volunteer component is the backbone of the program, DeBerry says. “Many of the people the patients come into contact with are medical people. Hospice volunteers are the friend, companion or trusted stranger.”
Depending on the needs of the patient and family, volunteers may run errands, watch movies, read or merely listen to someone who needs to talk. One patient’s greatest wish was to organize the photographs she had stashed in boxes into albums. Volunteers helped her.
Volunteers also assist caregivers, sometimes by sitting with the patient while the caregiver goes shopping or writing thank-you notes to well-wishers.
Grossman first learned about the hospice philosophy after her husband’s death. She was doing volunteer clerical work in the hospital’s development office but thinking about working in a hands-on capacity, perhaps in the cancer unit. Then she met a hospice volunteer, a woman who had lost a son, who urged her to give it a try.
Today she believes strongly in hospice care and wishes she and her late husband could have experienced it, she says. “That’s the way I would have wanted it.”
———-
For more information on the Northwestern Memorial Hospice Program, call 908-7476.
