Tidings of Comfort
Palliative Care provides support and dignity for patients and families

Physicians and nurses devote their lives to treating disease and curing illness, all with the goal of restoring health to their patients. So it is with great difficulty that they yield to the discomfort that can sometimes accompany treating patients with chronic disease and advancing illness at the end of life. Fortunately, as treatments and medications for life-threatening illnesses have evolved, so have attitudes toward death and dying, and ways to help patients — both young and old — and their families prepare for it.

 
It was the revolutionary work of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, MD and her 1969 book On Death and Dying, that first brought death out of the dark for the medical community. She once wrote about the patient, “He may cry for rest, peace, and dignity, but he will get infusions, transfusions, a heart machine, or tracheostomy. He will get a dozen people around the clock, all busily preoccupied with his heart rate, pulse, electrocardiogram, or pulmonary functions, his secretions or excretions — but not with him as a human being.”

 
Kubler-Ross set the standard for a more humane doctor-patient relationship. With the advent of hospice programs and increased patient awareness, hospitals and health care professionals have embraced palliative care — comfort care for those facing life-threatening illness.

For parents Ron and Melissa Wieland, along with their young sons Robert and Andrew, it was the birth — and imminent death — of their infant daughter Elizabeth that awakened them to the need for palliative care, although they wouldn’t have called it that. They just knew that their family needed space and time to say good-bye to their weekold daughter and baby sister, Elizabeth.

Born at Little Company of Mary Hospital – Torrance and diagnosed at birth with Trisomy 13, a genetic disorder that includes heart disease, Elizabeth was not going home.

Two hospital beds were pushed together inside an empty patient room. Fresh flowers, food and chairs for the extended family made the room as comfortable as possible. The family slept there, taking turns holding baby Elizabeth as they all faced the inevitable. Komatsu and the nurses were with them, too.

Komatsu remembers this as a seminal event that changed his practice. “Those parents inspired us to do really good work. We didn’t really plan it. It all came together. As we saw the family grieving, we realized that we had to do something differently. I didn’t realize at the time that what we were doing was palliative care but, of course, that is what we were doing.”

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