But what happens when these people are dying? Where do they find care in their final days?
“Being sick is hard. Being sick and homeless can be even harder,” Dr. Naheed Dosani, a palliative care specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, says with obvious understatement.
Dosani, a member of a large network of inner-city health physicians, is part of a new program that takes end-of-life care to the homeless and vulnerably housed wherever they are situated.
Called PEACH — for Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless — the watchword of the mobile program is to give individuals the dignity of choosing where they receive medical and supportive care, and hopefully where they will able to die.
“Most people want to pass away at home with family around them,” says Dosani. “That sentiment is no different for the patients PEACH aims to treat. The only difference is that our patients’ homes are often a shelter and their families may be other shelter clients and staff.”
A visit to one of his patients brings home that desire with poignant clarity: Dan Thibideau has two wishes — he wants to live out his final days in his furnished unit at the Fred Victor transitional housing centre in downtown Toronto, close to the people who share his world, and to reconnect with the children he hasn’t seen for almost 20 years.
“They made me an offer of going into a hospice, but I said I had my own friends and people to support me,” says Thibideau, who at 59 has advanced lung cancer and at about 100 pounds, is less than half the weight he once was.
“My wishes are I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to spend what I have left alone,” he says softly weeping, sitting on a sagging brown couch that has seen better days.
“There’s some people I’ve known for years, they keep an eye out for me and they’re there when I need help,” Thibideau explains, adding that the nurses who check on him and give him his medications are “kind to me.”
“I’m happy they gave me a place to come to that’s close to the people I know. I don’t know any other people that love me.”
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