October 11, 2008 is World Hospice and Palliative Care Day. The theme this year is "Hospice and Palliative Care: a Human Right". How will you celebrate?

I'll be celebrating by doing what I love - admitting patient to the local hospice agency I work for. Okay, that probably doesn't sound like much of a celebration but I'm scheduled to work so that's what I'll do. I will, however, make sure to open a good bottle of wine when I get home (woo hoo!).

This week I'll be posting events that are taking place around the world in celebration of the big day. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to show your support of palliative care and hospice by attending one.

World Day Event to Focus on Hospice and Palliative Care as a Human Right

The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) and the George Washington University's Public Health Student Association, along with the Foundation for Hospices in Sub-Saharan Africa and the National Hospice Foundation, are hosting a film, discussion, and reception on October 8 in honor of World Hospice & Palliative Care Day 2008.

Where: George Washington University's Jack Morton Auditorium
Media and Public Affairs Building
805 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC

RSVP/Info: Ms. Funmi Adesanya fadesanya@fhssa.org or call 703-647-6684.

Grief is turbulent, unpredictable, and chaotic like a violent storm. When you are consumed in it, where do you find peace? A mother who lost her newborn daughter just hours after birth shares where she found her peace in a story written for the Buffalo News. Andrea Burtis learned her daughter would die when she was only 17 weeks pregnant. She hoped for a miracle and planned for her daughters death with the help of Caring Hearts Perinatal Hospice in Buffalo, NY. Her daughter, Isabel, was born on May 18, 2008 at 11:07 p.m. She died just short of two hours later at 1:05 a.m.

Andrea explains her grief:

The curtain of grief was drawn when we were told she had passed. At the same time, we clearly saw how much we had lost and how much we had gained in the past few months.

To talk about Isabel is to tell a story of seeming paradoxes. Our experience strengthened and humbled us. Our lives were shattered and yet made whole. There is a peaceful center in the eye of grief. It is only by going through the most turbulent part of the storm that one can find that place, though.

Learn more about how perinatal hospice can help families facing the death of their unborn child.

The Littlest of Patients: Perinatal Hospice

Perinatalhospice.org

Be Not Afraid

Thanks to my friends on the perinatal hospice yahoo group for bringing this story to my attention.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) are investigating a new treatment for brain tumors - delivering a cancer fighting gene to healthy brain tissue that surrounds the tumor to keep it from spreading. The research has shown promise in lab animals in protecting healthy brain tissue from cancer growth. As with other forms of palliative treatment for cancer, gene therapy won't cure the illness but researchers are hopeful that the treatment will slow tumor growth, prevent spreading, and improve quality of life.

According to the MGH Public Affairs website:

"The researchers first pretreated immune-deficient mice by delivering a gene for human interferon-beta – a protein being tested against several types of cancer – into the animals’ brains using adeno-associated virus vectors known to effectively deliver genes to neurons in the brain without the immune reaction produced by other vectors. Two weeks later, human glioblastoma cells were injected into the same or adjacent areas of the animal’s brains. After only four days, mice expressing interferon-beta had significantly smaller tumors than did a control group pretreated with gene-free vector. Two weeks after the glioblastoma cells were introduced, the tumors had completely disappeared from the brains of the gene-therapy-treated mice."

There are still many questions to be answered and many more studies to be done.

"Since interferon-beta treatment is known to have side effects, it will be important to identify any toxicity caused by long term secretion of the protein in the brain and develop preventive strategies, such as turning off the introduced genes. Next the MGH team is planning to test this strategy on glioblastomas that occur naturally in dogs, which could not only generate additional data supporting human trials but also develop veterinary treatments for canine patients."

I'll be watching this study closely, hoping it is successful.

What is Palliative Chemotherapy?

Palliative Chemotherapy: 5 Questions for Your Oncologist

I've been asked many times why the URL of this site is dying.about.com if my topic is really palliative care. You can see from my last post that palliative care isn't only for the dying so there does seem to be some disconnect between my topic and it's corresponding URL.

This site used to be About Death and Dying with palliative care and hospice only one aspect of it. It contained a lot of fluff - poetry about death, information about pet death, suicide, etc. - that isn't really on-topic with palliative care and hospice. In attempts to re-shift the focus of this site to more medically sound information about palliative care, hospice, and end-of-life care, the powers that be at About.com renamed the site to About Palliative Care and that's where I stepped in.

Unfortunately, the web is a strange and mysterious place which I'm only beginning to understand and the technicalities of changing URL addresses remains a mystery. What I do know is that changing the URL would have been a disservice to the thousands of subscribers and frequent visitors to the site and forum. So, it made more sense to keep the URL dying.about.com.

I hope that clears it up for you curious folks out there. And I hope it doesn't keep any weary prospective palliative care patients from accessing important information about palliative care options.