New spots to cater to patients at campsite
Posted on Monday, August 4, 2008
Sharon and Billy Taylor spent the last month living in their 18-foot Four Winds travel trailer in west Little Rock’s Maumelle Park as Billy Taylor had daily cancer treatments for multiple myeloma at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Across the park, Billy Hartsfield and his wife, Marilyn, call their 37-foot Big Sky Montana trailer home as he has daily radiation therapy for cancer of the vocal cords at Central Arkansas Radiation Institute on Kanis Road.
Considered a low-cost alternative to hotels and motels, Maumelle Park regularly attracts out-of-town patients and their family members. More than 80 people stayed at the park over the past year while getting treatment at Little Rock medical facilities, according to the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns and manages the site.
“People come in from all around the state, other states and in a few cases other countries to get medical treatment,” said P. J. Spaul, spokesman for the Corps’ Little Rock office.
“It can get expensive if you’ve got a family member or family members trying to be here with you while you’re undergoing treatment.”
But federal limits on how long people can rent a campsite there pose a problem for those coping with unpredictable medical conditions.
So the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and UAMS have joined in a cost-sharing agreement to build six to 10 campsites for UAMS patients having long-term outpatient medical treatment.
The medical center, its Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute and Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy, are giving $ 90, 000 for construction of the campsites. The Corps, which will build, manage and maintain the sites, also got a $ 10, 000 grant from its national office for the project.
The first campsites at Maumelle Park, along the Arkansas River near Pinnacle Mountain, are expected to be open by October.
LIMITED STAY Henrietta Jesse is living at the park while her husband, Louis, recovers from open heart surgery at John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital. She and her 80-year-old sisterin-law spend most of their days at the hospital and their nights in their 1996 NewMar travel trailer. They’re a long way from their home outside of Joplin, Mo. Henrietta said she’s not sure what she’ll do if her husband has to be in the hospital a long time. They can only stay at the park through Aug. 18, and she doesn’t know where else to go. She and her sister-in-law can’t move the 41-foot trailer on their own. “My husband always did that. I’m not sure I can do it by myself without tearing something up,” she said.
Dr. Peter Emanuel, director of the UAMS Cancer Institute, said many patients stay for weeks or months of treatment at a time. It’s difficult for them to have to move every couple weeks if they’re staying in a recreational vehicle or travel trailer.
It’ll help to have the new campsites, where UAMS patients can stay as long as needed, Emanuel said.
Spaul said the two-week time limit is a national rule of the Army Corps of Engineers to prevent people from staying in parks too long. Stays can be extended to four weeks during certain times of the year.
As chief of operations for the Corps’ Little Rock district, Lee Bass said he regularly gets calls about patients who need to stay at Maumelle Park more than two weeks.
“Our rules say we’ve got to move them out because it’s a public facility and it has to be open for all of the public,” Bass said.
In such cases, park rangers have helped people find somewhere else to live, but they’d prefer not to have to ask them to move at all, he said.
So Bass talked to his wife, who works at the UAMS Cancer Institute, and she helped him contact hospital officials about starting the agreement to share the cost of more campsites.
Using donated dollars allows the park to bypass the usual time limits.
“It keeps us from having to be bad guys and moving people out of the campsite,” Spaul said. The new campsites will be built in the existing camping area, which currently has 129 sites, said Miles Johnson, acting project operations manager at the Corps’ Russellville Project Office. Patients will be able to reserve sites through the UAMS Patient Advocates Services office. Bass said the agreement may be extended to other hospitals in the future. “If this works, we may talk to others,” he said.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME The Taylors’ trailer provides close quarters with a dinette, miniature refrigerator and stove, bathroom and a double bed tucked in the back corner. Sharon Taylor said it’s served them well since they started traveling to the Myeloma Institute four months ago.
“It’s pretty small,” she said, “but it’s just the two of us.”
Billy Taylor, 59, has good days and bad days. The pains first started in his shoulder a year ago and spread throughout his body.
It took six months to get a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, or cancer of the plasma cells. Doctors found lesions in his pelvis, sternum, spine and skull.
He’s now on a five-year treatment plan, returning to Little Rock for treatments every couple of months. Doctors say he has an 85 percent chance of going into remission.
“For us, our faith is what gets us through, because I believe that God is walking with us every step of the way,” Sharon Taylor said. “We went from a devastating diagnosis to hope, and that means a lot.”
Billy Taylor said he enjoys sitting in the lawn chair outside the trailer, watching hummingbirds buzz up to a red feeder that hangs nearby or bluejays squabbling with squirrels at another feeder a few feet away.
Their real home is 170 miles away in Natural Dam, a small community near Devil’s Den State Park in Crawford County.
“All we knew about Little Rock was what you hear about cities — that there’s murder, crime and all that,” Billy Taylor said. “We never lived in the heart of a big city. Out here it just feels like home.”
Cost was also a factor in choosing the park. At $ 20 a night, including electricity and water, the campsite is much cheaper than staying in a hotel or renting an apartment.
Health insurance doesn’t cover accommodations, and with a mortgage and other bills still to pay at home, they need to save all they can, Sharon Taylor said.
As guests older than 62, the Hartsfields pay half price, or $ 10 a night, for their campsite.
“We can live cheaper in this thing than we can at home,” Billy Hartsfield said.
Home is 130 miles away in El Dorado, but they’ll spend their weekdays at Maumelle Park until Billy Hartsfield, 68, completes his treatment in early September.
He’s having radiation therapy after doctors removed a lesion on his vocal cords June 27.
Each morning they drive the 10 miles from the park to CARTI, where it takes doctors about 10 minutes to blast both sides of his neck with radiation.
The rest of the time they spend driving around, going to movies, shopping or eating at restaurants. At the park, Billy Hartsfield said he likes to fish in the Arkansas River and feed geese that wander through the campsites.
He’s counted 56 geese total.
The Hartsf ields are accustomed to staying in parks. They’ve owned a travel trailer for years, and regularly travel throughout Arkansas and surrounding states with Heidi, their 9-year-old miniature schnauzer.
They bought their new trailer a few months ago.
“We bought it just for travel,” Marilyn Hartsfield said. “We didn’t know we’d be living in it for six weeks.”
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