As Don Urbanek lay in a hospital bed, his pain from terminal cancer eased by medication, he expressed a wish: to visit his son’s ranch in Oklahoma before dying.
“We will do whatever we can” to make that happen, nurse practitioner Kathleen Murphy-Ende said, as a social worker stood nearby.
The delicate moment seemed typical for hospice, the medical specialty that focuses on the end of life. But Urbanek wasn’t a hospice patient. He was receiving palliative care, a related but different service provided in a new unit at UW Hospital.
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