'All I know is that Laguna Honda took my friend in when I was desperate and could find no other place for him. And they took good care to see he died well.'
My friend Travis would have had something to say about the ongoing debate over the fate of Laguna Honda – because he died there.
At least part of the controversy over closing the hospital has to do with whether we should have large, centralized institutions taking care of the sick or whether smaller, more widely dispersed ones are better.My friend was a talented freelance photographer who took rich black and white images of farmers, coal miners and ditch diggers. He loved images of what he called “dirty work.” He was also an alcoholic, a chain smoker, and in constant trouble with the IRS.
I’d heard about Laguna Honda, so I paid a visit. As I walked through the long, open ward of the hospice wing, I was in shock. This was back when the hospice ward was full of AIDs patients, before the widespread availability of HIV treatments or any hope for a cure. There I saw young men horribly ravaged by AIDs. They were skeletal, they had diarrhea; those with dementia might rave and the lesions on their frail faces and bodies looked like gruesome wounds. Your eyes had to turn away.
At the end of each ward was a round sunroom. That’s where I talked to the hospice doctor. He told me it was his main job to carefully manage each person’s pain. Enough medication so that he would be in little pain, but not so much that they couldn’t recognize or talk to visitors.
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