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'Quillows' comfort patients

• "Quillows," quilted blankets that turn into pillows, help chemotherapy patients stay warm in treatment rooms.

Joshua Brown

ALBANY — When Kathy Nelson was diagnosed with cancer the first time, she beat it. The second time she was diagnosed, she couldn’t believe it. But the third time was the hardest.

“I had to retire with disability,” she said recently in her room at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, where she was undergoing chemotherapy.

Nelson was a teacher at a gifted program with the Dougherty County School System until her retirement earlier this year.

“I’m a gung-ho person. Anybody that teaches school is a gung-ho person,” she said.

Nelson was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2000. She took tablets for about five years and the cancer went into remission.

“They say after five years, you’re home free,” she said.

But in April 2006, Nelson was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in her abdomen lining and underwent chemotherapy treatments for eight months. The cancer went into remission at the sixth month of treatment, but returned by month eight, she said.

“I thought, ‘I can’t believe it’s happened to me again!’ ” Nelson said. “I felt like when it had been three years and four years and five years, I thought it was over and it would never happen to me again.”

While Nelson has received support and care from her husband, church members and former students, she got a little unexpected help from some of the nurses at the hospital, who work with her anesthetist husband.

The nurses from the Post-Anesthesia Care Unit asked her what her favorite colors were — red, blue and purple — and quilted her a pillow, otherwise known as a “quillow.”

“It took some time out of their day and that was something they wanted to do and it would give joy and comfort to me every day that I use it,” Nelson said. “There are just certain things you take with you to chemo that mean so much.

“You can put your feet in the pouch, or (use the quilt) as just a pillow, because they don’t have pillows back there (in the chemotherapy treatment room). So there’s lots of uses.”

Lynda Bailey, an RN with the PACU, said the idea for the quillows came in October when a nurse in the unit delivered one as a birthday present — the first of the quillows project — to her for her mother Ann’s 70th birthday.

“We passed it around all day, then I took it home and I tell you, it’s on the couch right now,” Bailey said during a recent interview at Phoebe.

All of the PACU’s 22 employees help with the quillows through funding or sewing, although there are only six seamstresses, Bailey said.

Laurie McCall, the nurse whose idea it was to make the quillows for chemo patients, had worked in another hospital where staff had made quilts for some of its patients and suggested the PACU’s staff do the same thing with quillows, Bailey said.

Now, the hospital’s nurses are beginning to stockpile the quillows to begin distributing them on Dec. 1 to chemo patients there who may not have local family members who can visit. Bailey said the nurses decided to give the quillows to chemo patients after adopting families for the last two years because they could touch more lives that way.

“We felt that we could touch more people who had a greater need,” she said. “There’s always that patient that comes in that doesn’t have any family locally.”

The quillows take a few hours to assemble. But the amount of their spare time it consumes, despite working harsh hospital hours and having families at home, too, is worth it because of the joy it brings to the patients, Bailey said.

“You know, you take care of your own family, but you take care of others, too. That’s part of what we do as nurses,” she said. “Wherever there is a need, we try to do what we can to jump in and fill that need.”

Despite the difficulty of dealing with her disease, Nelson says she’s learned a lot from her experiences with cancer.

“We need to treasure each moment and treasure our friends,” she said, an I.V. sitting by her bedside. “I do not know how I would have made it through without Jesus Christ and my Christian friends.”

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