Peterborough Community Chaplaincy :: Prison Ministry

Diane King

Retired teacher offers solace to dying inmates

By Paul Dalby ~ TheStar.com -

Diane King says she will never forget the day she saw her first palliative-care ex-inmate patient in July 2007.

"He was dressed in the orange jumpsuit of a prisoner, and his legs and hands were shackled. Physically, he looked 10 years older than someone living outside prison."

That inmate was 46-year-old Mike Walsh, jailed for 10 years in the Bath federal institution near Kingston. He had been handed a second, much harsher sentence when doctors diagnosed him with terminal lung and throat cancer, and gave him seven months to live.

Officials at Correctional Service of Canada and the National Parole Board agreed that Walsh, having served the mandatory portion of his sentence, could be released into the care of a radical new palliative care program for inmates in Peterborough.

The importance of that decision cannot be measured, according to King. "The inmates strongly believe that if they die in prison, they will go straight to hell. This is what they tell us," she says.

Drawing on a lifetime's experience that included geriatric acute care, King volunteered to organize the program for the Peterborough Community Chaplaincy, part of an inter-denominational community organization across Canada.

Retirement had been beckoning the 63-year-old veteran nurse, who last month stepped away from her university teaching job after 42 years in the nursing profession.

But the idea of a rocking chair did not sit well with King, who taught in the Trent University/Fleming College nursing program. "I've been a nurse forever and I have difficulty imagining what it will be like to be anything else," she says.

Instead, she plunged energetically into setting up the pilot palliative program for terminally ill prison inmates from the Kingston, Bath and Warkworth penitentiaries.

Walsh would be the first of many inmates released from their own unofficial death row into her care. There are now six in the program, with another 15 who have been placed in the community.

"I was trying to set up support for these guys but, at first, a lot of people in the community did not want anything to do with ex-cons," King says. "Even before we could arrange for their medical care with the Community Care Access Centre in Peterborough, I had to make a full presentation to the staff. They wanted to be sure it was safe for them to go into the house."

Rehabilitating the former prisoners to a new way of life would prove to be an equally difficult task for King and her team of volunteers.

King recalls she even had to educate the ex-offenders on the importance of hygiene and washing their hands.

"These guys have never had to solve a problem in their lives," she explains. "They're all federal prisoners with at least five-year jail terms, so they get up with a bell, they eat with a bell, they go to bed with a bell. Inside prison, they don't have to think."

But once released into the Peterborough program – called Transition House – the ex-inmates are encouraged to do normal household chores, as well as their own grocery shopping. "I had to give them nutrition training to make sure they bought the right kinds of food," King says.

She taught herself to write a grant application to the Trillium Foundation – set up by the provincial government as a charitable foundation – and is still somewhat amazed that Trillium gave the project $58,000.

And although she has recruited nursing friends to volunteer their time administering palliative care at Transition House, she still calls in to see the clients herself several times a week.

"Diane's a great person," says Walsh. "I pick up the phone and call Diane lots of times when I need help because I get confused about the meds I have to take. She's always there for us."

It's certainly a far cry from his last months in a prison cell, suffering the side effects of chemotherapy.

"I had no family around me there, nobody explained what was happening with my health," he says.

"Coming here was such a change for my body, then a change in the way I felt about myself, and my body started to respond. I found that I could actually start to breathe again."

Walsh – who has spent two-thirds of his life in and out of prison – is sure that it's the quality of care he has received in the program that has allowed him to defy death. Now 48, he has lived two years beyond the date doctors predicted he would.

"I have now been told I will die by this December," he says. "But I just take it one day at time."

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ptbochaplaincy@nexicom.net

From The Star

http://www.thestar.com/article/629626

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