It’s a compassionate cover-up.
Quilter Joyce Young has taken over a program that provides quilts to palliative care and chemo patients at Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
Young, who assumed responsibility for the caring project in May 2012, delivered several quilts to patient care co-ordinator Barb Bare in June.
Bare, who is thrilled Young has taken on the project, remembers with fondness the woman who initiated the program more than a decade ago.
In 2011, then 76-year-old Georgina Lamanes spoke to the Observer about the palliative care quilt project she began in 1998.
Battling cancer since 1997, Lamanes’ husband was admitted to the hospital in June 2000, succumbing to the disease in September that year.
During the two months he was in hospital, Lamanes and her daughter remained with him in the large palliative care room then located on the second floor.
“We used to take him out in a wheelchair and all they had to cover the patients were flannel sheets,” she said in a 2011 interview. “In the meantime, I had become friends with Barbara Bare and I went to see her after my husband died to ask her if she would like some quilts.”
A member of the quilters guild, Lamanes organized a smaller group of women to make the palliative care quilts.
“That definitely helped me heal,” she said. “It just would keep me busy, and knowing other people are getting help and some love that we pass on.”
It was that spirit of love that fostered a close friendship between Lamanes and Bare.
“She was such a gentle lady and I always looked forward to Georgina limping along with her suitcase full of quilts,” says Bare, who misses the caring woman who died in 2011. “It was always a lovely thing to see her face and all the hard work the ladies did – it was heartwarming.”
As a nurse, Bare says giving a quilt to someone when they have nothing else to look forward to is a privilege.
“It’s something to keep them warm and loved when times are tough,” she says, noting the quilts are a lovely remembrance for the families as well. “We just feel it’s something that we can give to them that’s more than nursing care – it’s not a pill, it’s not an injection, it’s just human. And it makes us feel better too.”
Bare says recipients are deeply touched that somebody they don’t know has made a quilt for them. It is an idea that touched Young when she saw it as an item on the quilters guild list of volunteer opportunities.
“It was something I thought I could do and nobody else was doing,” says Young, a member of the Shuswap Quilters Guild, who is being assisted by a small group of women. “So I thought I’d direct my energies to somewhere else where it was needed.”
Chemo quilts are 48 by 60 inches and the wheelchair quilts are no bigger than 40 by 48 inches. The group also produces single bed-size quilts as well.
Wheelchair quilts take about one week to finish but production time for a twin-size quilt is much longer.
“They could use all the quilts they possibly could get and I appreciate all the help I get from the ladies that make these quilts,” Young says.
Grateful for the quilts, but looking beyond for her palliative care patients, Bare dreams of the day when Salmon Arm will have a designated palliative care facility. She says on average, Shuswap Lake General Hospital has about one patient per week who is in need of end-of-life care, but there are not enough palliative care beds to accommodate them.
“This community can build anything when they put their mind to it,” she says of the Shuswap’s reputation as a caring, cash-donating community. “I know it would be Georgina’s dream, to one day have a special place. She was very dedicated to that belief.”
In the meantime, anyone who is interested in donating fabric or joining the caring band of palliative care quilt-makers is invited to call Joyce Young at 250-675-2295.