A cancer patient’s pets inspired a push for pets in hospice wards

When Ewa Lutka-Krawczyk was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer, her first thought was for Gaja, a shelter dog she had taken in three years ago. She asked her doctor to assure her she would live a few more years so the deeply attached Gaja “wouldn't be left behind.” But the prognosis was grim, and in June, the 70-year-old was admitted to the palliative ward of a Warsaw hospital. Left at home with Lutka-Krawczyk's husband, Gaja was barely eating. “She is waiting for me,” Lutka-Krawczyk said from her bed, where she rested with a draining tube attached to her abdomen. Under proposed new legislation in Poland, patients like Lutka-Krawczyk soon would have the right to be visited in hospices and palliative care wards by their pets. Visits are already allowed in many clinics, but there is no universal right under the law. Dr. Tomasz Dzierżanowski, director of the Palliative Medicine Clinic at the Medical University of Warsaw, where Lutka-Krawczyk is being treated, has led the proposal, which was introduced to parliament by a member of Prime Minister Donald Tusk's centrist party. Dzierżanowski said the presence of a beloved pet can ease the physical and spiritual pain of terminally ill patients at a time when society is experiencing “an epidemic of loneliness.” “We make sure that no patient dies alone,” Dzierżanowski said in an interview with The Associated Press. “When someone is suffering, it is important that someone is there for them. Ideally, that should be another human being,” he said. “Sometimes, however, there is no one." Dzierżanowski said he often sees older patients isolated because they have outlived their friends, as well as young patients feeling alone in palliative care clinics because in today's world of screens and virtual friends, they have not built the kind of friendships that earlier generations often had. Dzierżanowski said the catalyst for his mission was a seriously ill cancer patient named Waldemar who was not afraid for himself but for his two cats. Dzierżanowski arranged for the cats to be brought into the ward. This article was provided by The Associated Press.