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Your Health: Season of Life

Your Health: Season of Life
WASHINGTON REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER -- When a loved one reached the final season of life it can be difficult for the family to find help.  Tammy Shipley turned to the Willard Walker Hospice House for her mother's final days.

Shipley says, "The thing that to me that just so set this facility apart was the privacy that the family had. With your loved one, you could be as private as you wanted to be. In your suite, you had your own bedroom, your loved one has their room. There's even a lovely deck in the outside if you want to go sit outside. It's a beautiful facility. You can spend the night, you've got your own little kitchenette, a refrigerator, everything that you need to stay there. If they're needing medical attention, you can go into your room and kind of let them be cared for in that way while you get some rest while someone's attending to them and open up the door when you're ready to be a part of that. There's also two televisions in there, so the patient can be watching one show and you can go watch another if you just wanted to. And it's a home atmosphere, absolutely. There's even a dining room here. I know on several occasions, I had a meal brought in for my grandmother, and we would go sit at a dining table as a family and eat. There's a library, which we're sitting in now. The people here are so attentive and we all live in the area and we all work. So, we can actually go to work and know that our patients were loved on by this staff and they loved on her just like we would while we're gone. And we might get a phone call, "Hey, she's asking for this," or "What time do you get off," or "Could you run by here," and that was a comfort, you know, because I know not all families are able to stop everything just to be right there. It's nice to know that you've got a staff that cares like that."

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