Walter Henderson doesn’t know how much longer he has to live. Diagnosed last year with lung cancer and untreatable metastatic melanoma, the 87-year-old Allagash native isn’t making any long-term plans. But with hospice services already in place, Henderson counts on being able to remain comfortably at home with his wife, Shirley, until the end.
On Friday, the Hendersons were paid a special visit by U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud, chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Health. Michaud arrived just before noon at the couple’s log-cabin-style home in a modest Hampden subdivision. He spent a relaxed half-hour in a cushioned Canadian rocker, discussing Walter Henderson’s military service in World War II, the importance of end-of-life care, and the privilege of living and working in the northern Maine woods.
“Hospice has been so good to us,” Shirley Henderson told Maine’s 2nd District congressman, who hails from East Millinocket. “All we have to do is say we need something, and — bingo — they’re here.”
Because Walter Henderson is a veteran of World War II, his care is being coordinated and paid through the Togus VA Medical Center. Weakened by his cancer and debilitated by severe arthritis, Henderson is dependent on this support to keep him safely at home with Shirley as his primary caregiver. Otherwise, the couple agreed, he probably would be in a nursing home by now. And Shirley, his wife of 67 years, would be living alone.
A VA nurse practitioner visits every other week to assess Walter Henderson’s condition, change any prescriptions, and order any needed blood work or other testing. A registered nurse from Community Health and Counseling Services in Bangor comes once a week to set up his complex regimen of medications, take his vital signs and check for any problems.
Other hospice visitors include a social worker and a spiritual adviser. Personal care workers will be available later, if they’re needed to help Henderson with baths, walking and meals.
A cadre of trained hospice volunteers provides essential transportation services to the couple, neither of whom drives anymore. Routine trips to medical appointments and the grocery store account for some of these jaunts. But volunteers also have taken Walter Henderson farther afield — once to the Greenville area to drive the bumpy logging roads and look for moose, and once for an afternoon visit to a nearby lakeside camp owned by a volunteer’s family.
“I really wasn’t aware of what hospice was all about,” Shirley Henderson said. “But when they started coming in, I couldn’t believe all the things they did for us.”
National health reform legislation pending in Congress is likely to include additional support for this kind of comprehensive end-of-life care, for veterans and civilians alike. Hospice services are widely recognized as both humane and cost-saving, aimed at keeping dying people comfortably at home while minimizing the trauma and expense of aggressive medical interventions and repeated hospitalizations.
Michaud told the Hendersons he will support expanding hospice services as part of the national reform. But some conservative groups have mischaracterized the effort to promote supportive end-of-life care as a lead-up to establishing “death panels” charged with denying treatment to the aged and the terminally ill, he said.
“People are all scared about it,” Michaud said.
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Shirley Henderson. In addition to providing medical services and practical support, she said, hospice professionals have helped the couple understand coming changes and to plan for the certainty of Walter’s death with confidence.
“It doesn’t bother me to talk about it,” she said. “I have to know where things stand. I appreciate them being open and honest. We couldn’t stay here alone without them.”
Walter Henderson engaged Michaud in a lively reminiscence of life in the northern Maine woods, including Henderson’s childhood growing up in the northern Aroostook County village of Allagash and his later career inspecting remote logging operations for compliance with the regulations of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The two men laughed over shared memories of special places and local characters in the region.
And they spoke of Henderson’s service in the U.S. Army Air Corps during WWII, including his assignment to a secret base in the Mojave Desert in California, where he worked as a mechanic on developing jet aircraft technology. Famed pilot Chuck Yeager, later credited with breaking the sound barrier, was assigned to the same base and lived nearby, Henderson recalled.
Michaud thanked Henderson for his service to the country and told the couple about a large new VA clinic that will be built soon in Bangor. And military veterans in Greenville and Jackman soon will have access to services from a mobile clinic in that area, he said.
Walter Henderson thanked Michaud for looking out for the interests of Maine veterans, but said he probably won’t live to see the new clinic.
“Shirley and I are about the same age. It could be either one or the other of us to go first,” he said, smiling across the room at his wife. “If I go first, I’ll be waiting for you, babe.”
