Faced with terminal cancer, Allendale man spends his days comforting hospice patients

SADDLE RIVER — Not one to intrude, Dave Woods knocked before entering the room.

“Hello, Nettie,” he said, greeting the elderly woman inside. Sitting upright in bed, she flashed a smile at Woods, a gentle man with a brown eye patch who carried a notepad and a small book of psalms.

As he sat bedside, the pair ruminated on their medical conditions, family and the meal of the day. Nettie is from Parsippany, it said in his notes. And she’s Jewish, so Woods flipped to a passage from the Old Testament.

“Do not fear, for I am with you,” he read from Isaiah 41:10.

Woods, 66, of Allendale, is a familiar figure in the hallways and bedrooms of Villa Marie Claire hospice, where men and women like Nettie go to spend their final days in dignity. Passing from room to room, he offers comfort where he can, reading Scripture, fetching a glass of water or, more often than not, simply sitting with them.

It’s his duty, he believes, because one day he’ll find himself on the other side of the bed.

A quiet presence

Behind Woods’ eye patch is a rare, incurable cancer that could claim his life in six months, a year, or longer if he’s fortunate. The illness has taken his eye, but his vision of the road ahead is clear: He'll volunteer until the day he enters Villa Marie, where he has chosen to die.

“Most rewarding for me is that if I leave a room, I can say that I made it a little easier for them,” Woods said.

Woods decided long ago that he didn’t want to die at home and force his wife into a caretaker role. On the other hand, the cold, institutional setting of a hospital wing also seemed unappealing.

On a drive one day, Woods passed a sign for Villa Marie, a place he had heard about but never visited in his 30 years in the area. Setting foot inside, he was immediately taken by the homelike ambiance, wood floors and fireplaces. The former estate sits on 26 acres in Saddle River, surrounded by meadows, walking gardens and a swimming pool.

“I knew this was right for me,” Woods said.

Before leaving, he inquired about a volunteer program.

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Since May, he’s visited the hospice at least two or three times a week for a few hours each day. The routine has become second-nature — first, he seeks input from the nurses on who could use a visit. Often, he’ll stroll up and down the hall and if a door is open, he’ll knock and peek in.

Patients for the most part are more than willing to chat. But it’s his condition that really opens the conversation and creates a feeling of solidarity, he said.

“The fact that I have incurable cancer gave me a credibility with loved ones and with patients,” Woods said. “I could empathize with them, and I decided that it was a gift I shouldn’t disregard, that I should share.”

With his genial presence and reassuring smile, Woods offers patients a brief reprieve from the daytime soaps on TV in the hospice rooms.

Though he brushes off their compliments, staff members marvel at his ability to connect with patients.

"I think he may have been a pastor in a previous life," said Jennifer Griffin, a spokeswoman for the hospice.

But to patients he's just Dave, a volunteer with a penchant for conversation, no matter how despondent. Some patients are forthcoming about about their personal lives. Others just appreciate the company.

“Sometimes patients don’t mind if you’re a quiet presence, if you just sit there with them,” Woods said.

Resilience and dignity

It was on his birthday, April 15, 2014, when doctors gave Woods a grim diagnosis. He had sought help after a church performance, when he noticed the sheet music to his right appeared blurry and then vanished completely. Tests revealed that he had choroidal melanoma, a rare eye cancer that affects six in 1 million people in North America each year.

Many would buckle at the diagnosis. Woods took it in stride.

“I felt very accepting. I wasn’t shocked, because cancer runs in my family,” he said.

To have any chance at remission required him to embark on a saga of chemotherapy, radiation and clinical drug trials. The positive results petered out after a few months, and the drug side effects became more trouble than they were worth, Woods said.

Now he has entered the palliative stage of treatment, when his primary concern is to feel comfortable.

“I had told the doctors to give it your best shot,” Woods said. “But I’m not that type of person who’s going to go to the Amazon looking to chew on an undiscovered plant.”

It's rare for someone in Woods' position to have such a grounded attitude, especially in a country where death is often considered too morbid to discuss, said Dr. Charlie Vialotti, Villa Marie's medical director.

“Culturally, Americans don’t want to talk about end-of-life issues,” Vialotti said.

We frame the conversation around avoiding death, rather than as an opportunity to improve quality of life, Vialotti said. The result is millions of patients who spend their final days in a dehumanizing hospital environment surrounded by machines.

“Studies show that the earlier people opt for palliative care or hospice care, the longer they live, the better quality of life they have,” Vialotti said.

Advancements in modern medicine, ironically, have led to treatments that can cause more pain and suffering than good, especially in elderly patients, Vialotti said.

“We die as a result of the treatment rather than as a result of the disease,” he said.

New Jersey residents in particular are more likely to die in a hospital intensive-care unit and have more appointments with specialist physicians — often to no avail — in the last six months of life than residents of almost any other state, according to research in the Dartmouth Atlas of Heath Care.

Part of the problem may be that there is a shortage of hospice centers, in part because they are money-losers, Vialotti said.

Villa Marie, for example, doesn't turn a profit. Instead it relies on philanthropic donations and grants, coordinated though Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, to care for as many as 20 patients at a time, Vialotti said.

Woods wants to fight the stigma that these centers represent finality. Or worse, that entering one means you've given up.

In his time at Villa Marie, he's seen resilience and dignity in the patients. They have confirmed his belief that acceptance and trust are critical to what he calls a peaceful transition, Woods said.

“I certainly have grown tired of the battle. And I don’t think that speaks poorly of me," he said. “I came to accept that it’s part of life, and I’ll deal."

Email: nobile@northjersey.com