By Rose Ellen O'Connor, Volunteer
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with deadly force in
August 2005 and Jane Callen watched the news accounts with horror. Thousands of
people were stranded, injured and dying and pleading for help. Bodies were
floating in the streets. Jane felt compelled to act. She took a three-week
leave of absence from her job as the Economic Information Officer for the U.S.
Department of Commerce and went to the Gulf Coast with the Red Cross.
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Jane volunteering as part of the
relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina. |
“Seeing those images, how could one not have been moved to
help?” Jane asks.
Since then, Jane, named Montgomery County, Maryland’s
volunteer of the year in April, has served in countless ways. She’s climbed a
mountain in Nepal to help victims of an earthquake and reached out to survivors
of hurricanes in Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Here at home, she
volunteers as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and the EMS Lieutenant with
the Glen Echo Fire Department, is a member of the Red Cross Disaster Action
Team, and sits with the dying in hospice care.
The desire to help is a glue that binds volunteers, Jane
says.
At first, those who came to help after Hurricane Katrina
struck seemed to have little in common and were a bit standoffish. As a woman
working atop a truck hoisting heavy loads of water, ice and other supplies,
dripping with sweat, days without a shower, hair wild, she caught some second
looks. But within a week, differences such as background, politics, and
education fell away. They were united by a shared commitment to help.
After a long, hot day, looking for survivors, they would
return to their base, collapse into flimsy camping chairs, and each throw back
a Bud Light. Then they would forage for food, opening up a can of whatever they
could find. Jane’s a vegetarian, so finding food could be challenging. Her
fellow volunteers would tease her, asking if she wanted cans containing beans
flavored with bacon. Then they would head to their bedroll and go to sleep on a
concrete floor.
Together, they saw many gut-wrenching scenes. There were the
poor neighborhoods where people were already living on the edge before the
hurricane and now were desperate, their basic needs not being met.
“Part of what made it possible to continue was we were there
for each other,” Jane says. “We stayed in touch long after that trip.”
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Jane volunteering as part of the
relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina. |
In April 2015, Jane went to Nepal for two weeks after a
devastating earthquake. Her team of four spent a day climbing a grueling
mountain path to reach a village in need. They made it to the top and a huge
earthquake – magnitude 7.3 – struck not far away. Buildings collapsed around
them and the path they had taken was buried by dirt and boulders. They treated
the most badly injured late into the night. It was an enormous challenge
getting the most seriously injured off the mountain. Villages and volunteers
worked together to build a fire of rags in hopes that a helicopter would spot
them. An Army chopper saw the flames and came.
Late that night, the team tried to get word to their
families back home that they were okay. Aftershocks were coming every few
minutes. They crawled on their hands and knees around the mountain top, waving
their phones in the air, trying to find a signal. No luck. Jane felt physical
pain thinking what her family must be going through.
Around 4 a.m., Jane awoke to dozens of tiny hands on her
tent. Village children were peering in to see who was there. Many of the
children needed attention for injuries and conditions unrelated to the
earthquake because they didn’t have access to proper medical care. The
volunteers got up and tended to the children’s medical needs as best they
could. All the while, Jane could not stop worrying about what her family might
be thinking. Later that morning, a man arrived who had fallen off a motorbike
while ascending the mountain during the second earthquake. He had a cell phone
and the volunteers were thrilled when they realized it worked. Jane called her
husband.
“The fact that I was alive and standing there on that
mountain bathed in sunshine, hearing my husband’s voice – it was a brilliant,
shining moment,” Jane says.
Jane’s memories of Nepal are flooded with the images of
families standing in front of piles of total wreckage that once had been their
homes. They were smiling. In the midst of disaster, they appeared happy and
grateful to be alive. They welcomed the volunteers as their friends.
“The radiance of the Nepalese,” Jane says, “is beyond even
the reach of an earthquake.”
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| Jane volunteering in Nepal for the devastating earthquake. |
In September 2017, Jane deployed to Jacksonville, Florida
and Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to help victims
of Hurricane Irma. It was still raining in St. Thomas and trees and twisted
power lines littered the streets. The island had no power.
In Jacksonville, the storm surge had not receded entirely
days after the storm. The volunteers went to visit an elderly couple who had
shuttered themselves into their home. They both were in declining health, and
the home had been in the family for decades. The couple was determined not to
be uprooted. Mold had begun growing on the walls and the scene was heartbreaking,
Jane says. They respected the couple’s wish to stay. The two had lost so much
and Jane didn’t want them to lose their dignity. The volunteers opened doors
and windows, set up a dehumidifier and some fans to get fresh air moving. They
made sure the couple had plenty of drinking water and knew who to call for
help.
As is too often the case with disasters, there can be so
much sadness that sometimes it is difficult to know what to say. After
Hurricane Irma, a woman came in to get her vital signs checked. It turned out
she and her family had lost their home when Hurricane Harvey struck Texas a
month earlier. Then the temporary housing they had found in Florida was wiped
out by Hurricane Irma. She and her husband and two children had been living in
their car when social services took their children away. In the midst of all of
this, she had a stroke. Jane convinced her to go to the hospital and the
volunteers also guided her to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local
social services for assistance finding her children.
But there was also joy in the smallest of things. Jane
recalls an elderly woman in a shelter in St. Thomas. The woman was blind,
unable to walk, and terminally ill. She’d been in hospice care before the
hurricane, but shelter workers couldn’t reach the hospice so she was not
receiving any pain medication. But she never complained. One day she told Jane
she’d really like some strawberry-vanilla ice cream. Here they were, in the
middle of an island in blazing heat without power. But it was the one thing
she’d asked for. Jane found a car and driver and they negotiated the debris,
moving at a crawl to the only open grocery store. Most of the shelves were
empty but unbelievably there in the freezer was one quart of strawberry-vanilla
ice cream. They inched slowly back to the shelter through snarled traffic and
brutal heat and somehow the ice cream didn’t melt. Jane joyfully handed it to
the woman.
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| Jane volunteering in Nepal for the devastating earthquake. |
“Her face opened into the most magnificent smile as she felt
the cold container in her hand and seconds later tasted the ice cream,” Jane
recalls. “It was magic.”
Here at home, Jane deploys most Monday nights as an EMT and
EMS Lieutenant with the Glen Echo Fire Department. A fair number of calls are
for cardiac emergencies. Administering CPR is hard and scary, although training
tempers the fear. As a crew, everyone is working together like mad trying to
revive the patient. It’s exhausting, physically and emotionally. But on those
occasions when you are able to bring someone back after a heart attack? It’s
beyond amazing, she says.
Jane helped develop the Advanced Life Support (ALS) program
at the Glen Echo Fire Department. ALS provides a higher level of pre-hospital
care for the most severe medical emergencies, such as unconscious patients and
cardiac events. It requires a vehicle equipped with more sophisticated and
expensive technology, such as a 12-lead cardiac monitor. Jane and the fire
chief met with Montgomery County officials and proposed a pilot program. Their
station would raise the money to pay for the equipment and train volunteers to
staff the vehicle. After six months, the pilot was declared a success and
became permanent.
At least once a week, Jane volunteers at the JSSA (Jewish
Social Service Agency) hospice. She also visits two people who were diagnosed
with six months or less to live several years ago. They left the hospice
program, but she continues to visit them.
Jane often brings her Yorkie, Callie, with her. Callie went
through the PAL (People Animals Love) certification program and is trained for
hospice care. Patients love Callie: she’s eight pounds of affection. She will
crawl right into bed with someone, lie against them, cuddle and lick them, Jane
says.
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Jane volunteering in Nepal for
the devastating earthquake. |
Jane also brings along a body tambura, a musical instrument
developed in India to help alleviate the pain of patients in hospices that
can’t afford pain medication. The instrument is placed on the person’s body. A
study at St. Joseph’s Hospice for Dying Destitute/South India found the
patient’s pain was cut in half after a relatively brief exposure and cut in
half again the next day. Jane contacted the study’s author and found she could
get a body tambura in Germany -- and had one made.
Jane’s interest in hospice care was sparked by the extremely
different experiences of her father and mother at the end of life. Her father
died in 2002 after a drawn-out battle with colon cancer. Jane recalls the
hospice caregivers that came to her parents’ home lecturing her father about
dying instead of listening to what he had to say. It broke him and all of the
family, she says.
Ten years later, her mother came to live – and die – in Jane
and her husband’s home. Her mother’s doctor, who was associated with the JSSA,
made house calls and guided them through the hospice process with kindness and
understanding – as well as enormous competence.
“After that experience, which I would characterize as a good
– even healing – death, I became an evangelist for dying well,” Jane says. “The
hospice team can make all the difference.”
Jane’s mother took her final breath within seconds of the
earthquake that struck Maryland in August 2011. Jane’s son had just moved back
from California and had the presence of mind to tell everyone to get to a
doorway. A little while later, Jane and a few close women friends and family
gently washed her mother’s body, all the while singing to her. As Jane sat by
her mother, more friends began showing up with fresh flowers and herbs from
their gardens and they lay them on and around her mother’s body. Some friends
played music. After the sun set, it seemed the right time to bring her mother’s
body out and as they emerged they found people with candles lining the path
from house to street.
“That set the tone for my work in hospice, really,” Jane
says. “The possibility of a beautiful experience
around death.”
Jane is one of 11 master trainers for Maryland Medical
Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment. MOLST is a document that captures
people’s end of life wishes. It goes way beyond its predecessor, the Do Not
Resuscitate Order. It captures a patients’ wishes for a host of treatments,
such as whether they want feeding tubes to be put in or to be transported to a
hospital. Jane and the other master
trainers travel around the state educating health professionals, assisted
living facilities, and the public in how to use the MOLST form.
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Jane was named Montgomery County, Maryland’s
Volunteer of the Month earlier this Spring. |
Jane, 57, has two masters degrees: one in social work and
the other in government. She is the senior editor and writer at the U.S. Census
Bureau. She lives in Bethesda, MD with her husband, Harry Lewis, and their two
Yorkies, Callie and Cruiser. Her one adult son is engaged and Jane says she’s
looking forward to grandchildren.
The third of four sisters, Jane says her parents chose to
settle in Chevy Chase because they believed the Washington area was ground zero
for civil and human rights volunteer work. Jane’s father, Dr. Earl Callen, a
college physics professor and department chair at American University, started
the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area. He was also on
the Helsinki Watch Committee, whose mission was to monitor the former Soviet
Union’s compliance with the Helsinki Accords, agreements to accept the
post-World War II status quo in Europe.
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| Jane Callen |
He regularly traveled back and forth to the Soviet Union to
try to help “Refusniks,” -- scientists being persecuted and prevented from
leaving. Dr. Callen frequently testified before Congress on this and other
issues. He also was an outspoken anti-war activist and was frequently
interviewed because, as a physicist, he could provide unique insight into
nuclear war.
Jane’s mother, Anita Callen, was a stay-at-home mom and her
quiet presence was the yin to her father’s yang, Jane says.
Jane recalls bouncing on her father’s shoulders amidst a sea
of people as they headed toward the Lincoln Memorial, joining Martin Luther
King Jr.’s March on Washington. It was her father’s 39th birthday –
August 28, 1963. She knew they were among a minority of white people and that
it was important to be there, to stand up for civil rights. It was one more lesson
on the importance of taking action, a father-to-daughter message that has
shaped her life.
“That was such an important lesson, taking action not for
self-gain but for a greater good – without regard to personal risk,” Jane says.
“Throughout his life, my father demonstrated the importance of always showing
up.”
