Bedside Buddies
Hospital Companions for a fee
By NESITA KWAN
Updated 12:30 PM CST, Thu, May 14, 2009
Caught in the middle.
That's how many people in the so-called "sandwich generation" say they feel. On the one hand, they have growing kids to take care of. On the other, they have parents, perhaps even grandparents, who are increasingly frail and need just as much help.
Cheryl Formento felt that way when her father was diagnosed with lung cancer after he moved to South Carolina. She was in Naperville, the mother of three young children, trying to stay in touch by phone, and trying to help her step mother.
"It was difficult to do," she recalls. "You can't really ask the nurse: is he making jokes, is he joking about his scar from the latest surgery... .the things that told me as his daughter what his state of mind really was."
Formento says her father battled the cancer for five years, and in that time she found herself "feeling guilty all the time." She remembers "just never feeling wherever I was, was where I needed to be at the time."
It's also what her cousin Kathleen Benner experienced during her grandfather's illness.
And that's how the two women came to form a company called Hospital Companions a couple years ago.
It is what it sounds like: a program that offers companionship to patients in the hospital. They're there to take notes if the family can't be there when the doctors are making rounds. They'll bring books or music, even art to decorate the walls. They'll relay a question to the nurses, if the patient wants them to.
But Formento and Benner say the program is equally geared to supporting the family as well.
And that's what patient Barbara Eastman, and her daughter Molly Williams described.
Williams heard about the new service from a friend, after learning that her mom was going in for a double knee replacement.
"I was in the hospital for four days, and then I moved to rehab for twelve days, " Eastman remembers.
Molly, who's a dental hygienist with three kids, knew she and her brothers and sisters couldn't be there all the time. So she turned to the company for what she jokingly describes as a "failsafe sibling."
"As much as I wanted to be there for her 24/7 it's just not possible.., " she says. She remembers that on particularly or unexpectedly busy days, calling Hospital Companions a number of times, and saying "you know what? Can you come down and stay with my mom for a couple hours? Just let me know how she's doing. Her pain's been bad today."
And Barbara Eastman describes the patient page that the company created, allowing her family in Michigan to log on to the web and get frequent updates about her condition.
"My family in Michigan, all my family, could access the website and they could see that on that day that I went to the bathroom myself with no help. I mean that's a biggie!", she laughs.
But as much as it eased Barbara's way through the hospital, her daughter says it eased those weeks for her as well.. "It definitely lessened that feeling that I had, that stomach ache, like is she OK? Is she worried. Is she sad?"
It's something that both founders of Hospital Companions remember feeling. They say they would have hired someone to do this in a heart beat.
It costs 45 dollars an hour with a three hour minimum. And as their business grows, they're hoping it's a service necessary enough that insurance will someday cover it.
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http://www.hospitalcompanions.com/
First Published: May 13, 2009 4:36 PM CST
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