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Mainz / AP
A terminally ill woman’s dearest wish was to see her favourite soccer team play one last time.
The woman, in her mid-50s, had suffered a heart attack and an infection of the abdominal cavity. Her hospice room was covered in football scarves and posters of German club FC Kaiserslautern.
Thanks to the Workers’ Samaritan Federation (ASB), a German aid and welfare organization, her dying wish came true.
“As we came into the room, she threw the covers back and wanted to go straight away,” recalls Karl-Heinz Pfaff, who volunteered to accompany the lady.
He helped her into the ASB’s converted ambulance and drove her from the hospice to the team’s home ground. As he took her into the stadium in the wheelchair, the fan club of which the woman was a member held up a “welcome back” banner.
Two weeks later, she was dead.
The service becomes available when relatives are unable to manage, explains Karina Dingebauer of the ASB.
“For example, if a passenger can only be transported lying down or requires nursing or medical care.”
The vehicles differ from normal ambulances in that there are windows all the way around, so that the passenger can look out in every direction.
All the medical equipment on board is concealed in cupboards. The ASB uses a more comfortable stretcher and a proper cover and pillow. There’s also a DVD system and a sound system just for the passenger. So far, there are eight vehicles like this in action around Germany, the first setting out two years ago. A ninth is to be added soon.
The passengers can take a companion along for free, Dingebauer explains. The service is financed by donations and ASB membership fees. There is no age limit, Dingebauer continues. The service is also available for
children.
For example, the ASB took nine-year-old Gianna, who suffers from a neurodegenerative disease, to her former school when it held an annual lantern procession she remembered with joy.
On another occasion, they took a 27-year-old woman with breast cancer and brain, bone and liver metastases to the seaside for the day.
Thanks to the service, a 64-year-old man was able to attend his daughter’s wedding, despite suffering from cancer.
Pfaff, who is a specialized nurse and emergency doctor, thinks the service is great. After the football match, he took the woman back to her hospice, where she was warmly received by the nursing staff in the middle of the night.”Suddenly everyone was crying – these were tears of joy,” Pfaff recalls.
Not long after, he had wanted to present the woman with the framed match ticket, he says. But, sadly, time had run out. “That affected me. Because I hadn’t thought of her as a dying person.”
