On the night of April 15, 1975, 21-year-old Karen Ann Quinlan told her roommates she wasn’t feeling well and went to lie down. A few minutes later, someone who went to check on her found her passed out, not breathing. They performed CPR and rushed her to the hospital, but she did not wake up and soon slipped into a coma.
The doctors, not knowing what else to do, put Karen Ann on a ventilator for life support. As the days went on and she did not come out of her coma, her adoptive parents, Joseph and Julia, questioned whether it was humane to keep her on life support and requested to have the ventilator removed, but they were told that such an action would be considered homicide by the laws of New Jersey, and the hospital refused to honor the Quinlans’ request until they received a court ruling that it would be legal for them to do so, which took more than a year to achieve.
Karen Ann, surprisingly, continued to breathe without the respirator, and lived for another nine years, although she never came out of her coma. Meanwhile, her family considered what they might be able to do to spare others some of the pain and frustration they had gone through while also dealing with the grief of losing their daughter and sister. On April 15, 1980, five years to the day after Karen Ann slipped into unconsciousness, Joseph and Julia Quinlan opened the Karen Ann Quinlan Hospice, offering necessary hospice care and pledging, through the work of the Karen Ann Quinlan Memorial Fund, that no patient would ever be turned away from their facility for inability to pay.
Hospice care was still a relatively new idea when the Karen Ann Quinlan Hospice first opened, but KAQH grew steadily, becoming Medicare and Medicaid certified in 1988, opening the Joseph T. Quinlan Bereavement Center in 2000 and the Karen Ann Quinlan Home for Hospice in 2014, to mention just a few of their biggest landmarks over the years.
This year, the International Doula Life Movement had the honor of teaming up with Karen Ann Quinlan Hospice, beginning a partnership that IDLM is extremely proud of. As doulas, we know how essential hospice care can be for people facing the end of life process and for their families, and we also know how much doulas can do in their work with clients to help remove stigma, encourage people to seek the type of treatment they need in a timely fashion, and help clients and their families benefit from hospice care early, to give them the greatest amount of time and quality of life.
Our own Anna Adams sat down with Lee Ellison, Director of Marketing for Karen Ann Quinlan Hospice, this week to record a podcast about KAQH’s history and its current mission. Since November is hospice awareness month, Anna will be releasing a new podcast episode each week focusing on KAQH’s different facilities and programs. Make sure to tune in for info, insight, and inspiration!
