Granting last wishes
On a chilly autumn day more than a decade ago, two paramedics with American Medical Response were on a standard transport near Woodland Park when they took a detour that would be the first of many important journeys.
The paramedics turned off the main highway and fulfilled the wish of a dying man.
“My partner was driving, and I was in the back with the patient,” paramedic Steve Berry recalled. “He was very ill and wanted to go home for his last few days. I asked him if there was something I could do to make him more comfortable.
“He said he wanted to look at the aspens one more time.”
Berry’s partner, Kim Madison, veered off U.S. Highway 24 and drove the ambulance deep into the woods. She came to a stop in a clearing with an expansive view of the fall colors.
“At first we opened the back bay door of the ambulance, and he looked out and said, ‘Can we go out there and breathe the air?’”
They honored that request and sat with him for about an hour.
The patient had no interest in conversing, though, and when Berry tried to talk with him, the man advised him to “pay attention.”
“I finally got what he was getting at. Sure enough, you heard the birds, you saw the leaves rustling in the wind,” Berry said. “It changed my perspective completely. It was such a moving experience for my partner and I.”
With that, “Sentimental Journeys” was born.
The program, a partnership between AMR and Pikes Peak Hospice, provides transportation and medical supervision for terminally ill patients seeking to fulfill a final wish.
In 1996, the American Ambulance Association honored Berry and Madison for the program, and Sentimental Journeys has since been recognized by the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. The program has also been copied by ambulance services and fire departments nationwide.
Last year, AMR paramedics volunteered more than 200 hours to provide 18 Sentimental Journeys, said Tawnya Silloway, community relations coordinator for AMR. The agency has done 13 journeys this year.
Paramedics never know where they’ll be going.
They’ve been to the summit of Pikes Peak, the casinos of Cripple Creek, the chapel at the Air Force Academy.
Along the way, they’ve fulfilled some unusual requests.
They took one woman to her favorite bar to party, with her physician’s approval, of course.
“She went and drank and smoked. She would look at us and smile and raise a glass to us,” Berry said. “We took one motorcyclist, he wanted one last bonfire with his Harley-Davidson gang.
“One lady wanted to go to Wal-Mart one last time. She went up and down the aisles buying stuff, and we thought this was an interesting last wish.”
So he asked her about it. Come Christmas, she’d be dead, she told him. She wanted to make sure her grandchildren and others in her family would have gifts from her.
On another journey, a man asked to spend a few hours at home. When he arrived, his wife was whipping up a huge meal. He was too sick to eat, and she knew it. But she wanted him to enjoy the aroma of her cooking one final time.
“Basically we give families one last chance to say they love each other in a different place,” said Berry, who added he doesn’t know who gets more out of the experience — the patients and their families or the EMTs and paramedics.
“What Kim and I found out as paramedics, it enlightened us, it gave us — I don’t know — a renewed strength on what we were doing day-today because too often we just see tragedy.”
Berry, a paramedic in Colorado Springs since 1984, took a break from AMR in 2001 to focus on his other talent: drawing humor cartoons about emergency services. His work has been compiled into 10 books (www.iamnotanambulancedriver.com), and he is a frequent speaker at EMS conferences across the nation. His talks center on “survival tips” — how to keep it light in what can be a dark profession. He said wherever he travels, he always speaks about Sentimental Journeys.
He returned to AMR part time last year. It was a difficult decision. His partner, Kim Madison, suffered a back injury that forced her to leave AMR. She died in April 2005 at age 44.
“We’d get very, very tired after those journeys. It was hard doing it again without her. It was a big step for me. After Kim died, I kind of made a promise I’d go back and do it again.”
On Oct. 25, a day before a blizzard swept through Colorado Springs, Berry was part of a journey that took 41-yearold Wendy Haver and her three children to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.
For three hours, Berry, EMT Todd Metz and others from Broadmoor Fire and Rescue pushed Haver’s cot up and down the hills of the zoo as her children — Mariah, 9, Ayla, who turned 7 this month, and Jesse, 4 — ran excitedly from exhibit to exhibit.
“The kids were having a lot of fun. I can’t say they were on their best behavior. We got to be down with the actual action. It was a really great day,” Haver said afterward from her bed at Pikes Peak Hospice.
“What it means to me is time with my kids — getting to see them have a lot of fun and knowing there aren’t going to be many times left. In a way it was bittersweet.
“It certainly helped me to give them something special to remember. Being able to look back and say, ‘OK, we did that with mom.’”
Haver died Nov. 2, a week after her “Sentimental Journey.”
She had suffered a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Berry said the hardest part of every journey is the return trip to hospice.
Still, he said the program is “probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”
But he puts the credit for the program elsewhere:
“If Kim hadn’t made that one turn off the road, it wouldn’t have happened.”
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0236 or
cary.vogrin@gazette.com
