Patch Adams Quotes

I have learned that delivering the best possible palliative care to children is vital, providing children and their families with a place of support, care and enhancement at a time of great need is simply life-changing.

You walk into someone's house and they're dying, or they've got a family member who is dying. Your needs are minor; you're there to serve and to advise and to educate. You're not there to provide yourself.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

I accept the dying process. I would just like to be as healthy as I possibly can at each step and phase along the way.

Hospice has brought such a light in my life. It is something I will be involved with until I need hospice myself.

Many of us have experienced the pain that comes with watching a loved one suffer with a serious illness. We also know that we would do absolutely anything it takes to help them beat it.

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident.

Around-the-clock support is crucial for children receiving palliative care. They and their families often need help every hour of every day, both in hospices and at home.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don't have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.

We do not need answers or formulas to minister in crisis.

I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind. What does that do to the grieving process?

When you are in the midst of suffering you are looking for someone to be Jesus to you. You are looking for someone to love you and help take care of you, and reach out to you.

In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.

I believe we should support people to live, and I am therefore in favour of good quality palliative care.

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

It's just awful to see her like this. There comes a point when euthanasia is kinder than the alternative, and I think we reached that juncture some time ago.

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.

Few years ago when I visited a palliative care centre in Chennai for the first time, it completely moved me. It's an emotionally draining experience. I saw and met patients who were abandoned by their families, and there is complete sense of hopelessness. Ever since, I have been a supporter for the need for funding and awareness of palliative care.

I fell in love with music because it gave me an escape, it gave me strength, and it gave me confidence.

Love is the only medicine I believe in.

I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground. (26)

The most important medicine is tender love and care.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.