QUIET DREAMS : County-Based Organization Dedicates Its Time to a ‘Simple’ Goal: Helping to Fulfill the Final Wish of Adult Victims of Cancer

Monico Ordonez, frail, ridden with cancer and grasping at the last threads of life, sobbed quietly. Minutes later, despite the pain, the old man managed to smile.

“I’m so happy to see my son,” Ordonez said, as tears escaped from his small, dark eyes.

For the 73-year-old Filipino immigrant, the moment with his son, Ferdinand, fulfilled a dying wish.

Ordonez had emigrated from the Philippines with his other six children in 1970, leaving behind Ferdinand, his eldest child, who wanted to stay with his wife and family. Soon after Monico Ordonez arrived in the United States, he suffered a severe stroke that left his left side paralyzed.

Ferdinand, who manages a small farm in Sanchez Mira, about 300 miles north of Manila, could not afford to visit the United States and had given up hope of seeing his father again.

As he fought his emotions outside his father’s private room at Chapman General Hospital in Orange, Ferdinand Ordonez talked of his joy in seeing his father for the first time in 10 years.

“We cried and we hugged. It was a very sad moment, but also a happy one,” he said. “I’m so glad I got to see my father.”

If not for the efforts of Quiet Dreams Inc., a small Orange County-based organization, Ordonez would not have seen his son before his death.

The group, begun eight months ago, works to grant last wishes to adult cancer victims. Ferdinand Ordonez initially had had his visa request denied by the U.S. Embassy. After Quiet Dreams and a local congressman intervened, the visa was issued and Ferdinand was able to make the trip.

Quiet Dreams, which is patterned after the Make-a-Wish Foundation of America, an organization devoted to granting wishes to dying children, has been able to fulfill requests from people in Southern California during the past few months.

Leaders of the group are hopeful the program will expand into regional chapters nationwide, as Make-a-Wish has done.

The idea for Make-a-Wish was born in 1980 in Phoenix, Ariz., after a small boy named Chris, who was dying of cancer, asked to become an Arizona Department of Public Safety highway patrolman. Through the help of a family friend who knew several highway patrolmen, the youngster was able to have his last wish fulfilled. News of that event inspired others in the city to form the foundation.

Since then, the organization has expanded to 50 chapters in about 35 states that grant dying wishes to children suffering from cancer. Linda Kaplan, director of the foundation in Phoenix, said the group’s goal is to establish chapters in all 50 states.

“I am delighted to learn of Quiet Dreams,” she said. “It is a heart-warming project. I am also pleased to know that I can refer adults to them since we only deal with children,” Kaplan said.

The spiritual force behind Quiet Dreams is Dr. Max Dine, who came up with the idea while treating cancer patients in Huntington Beach five years ago, about the time Make-a-Wish was being started in Phoenix.

“I could see some (last) desires by terminally ill adults,” he said. “I thought that if it could be done for children, why couldn’t it be done for adults?”

Dine then began efforts to grant wishes to some of his patients. He arranged for Los Angeles Rams quarterback Vince Ferragamo to visit one cancer patient, and another got to meet the California Angels before a game at Anaheim Stadium.

“Based on that, I knew it was possible to launch this kind of program, but it’s been rather difficult to get the organization going,” he said. “We need funds and publicity, and that’s our main problem. We need funds, but we can’t get funds without publicity. We need publicity, but we can’t get publicity without funds. So which comes first?”

Right now, Quiet Dreams is run by a 12-member board on a budget of less than $2,000, most of which was contributed by the board members themselves.

“We need to raise funds so we won’t have to turn down dream requests because we have no money,” Dine said. “So far, we’ve been lucky in that most dreams have not cost us anything. But we can’t rely on luck forever.”

Part of the problem, Dine said, is that adult cancer victims do not engage public sympathy the way child victims do.

“Some people seem to forget that older (cancer victims) have feelings too. People just seem to respond more when you ask them for funds for children,” he said.

Tina Revane, a health clinic administrator who is a Quiet Dreams board member, is in charge of fund-raising for the group. She said board members’ inexperience in such matters has been a hindrance. “It’s been very difficult,” Revane said. “We’re still in the process of inventing the wheel while other people have already invented the automobile.”

Nevertheless, word-of-mouth about the organization has brought in a few people, most of them medical professionals, who are devoting much of their free time to promoting Quiet Dreams.

Dine said, however, that the organization needs more volunteers from outside the medical field to help in solving the various problems that can arise in fulfilling a wish.

“We would like more professionals involved who can provide us with immediate answers to some of our questions,” Dine said. “A lawyer, for instance, could give us an immediate answer to a particular question instead of our waiting to find out later through another source.”

If Dine is the spiritual force behind Quiet Dreams, then its president, Jennie Lewis, is its mother superior. Her Anaheim home has served as the group’s headquarters--it was only recently that the group was able to afford a separate telephone line for Quiet Dreams.

Lewis, 37, who is a registered nurse, had worked with Dine several years ago. The two moved on to other jobs in Orange County but were reunited when Lewis developed cancer. She has beaten the disease--for now. Still, her illness and the reunion with Dine convinced her that there was a need for an organization such as Quiet Dreams.

‘Very Simple’ Goal

“We talked about it all through 1983 and most of 1984 before we were able to get the program started,” Lewis said.

Quiet Dreams was given nonprofit status from the federal government and set up in Lewis’ home last November.

“Our goal is very simple . . . to fulfill a dream of a terminally ill person with cancer. We decided to narrow it down to that,” Lewis said. To be eligible for the group’s assistance, a cancer victim must be at least 18 years old and have six months or less to live.

Quiet Dreams also requires confirmation in writing from a physician that the patient will not survive for longer than six months and that his or her illness will not be further complicated if the request is fulfilled.

“We also need that (confirmation) to tell us the person is well enough to fulfill the dream,” said Revane, the board member. “They can’t go through something that would be to their detriment.”

Dine said most of the wishes requested “have been relatively simple.” The patients usually want to meet a celebrity or attend a sports contest.

Some Requests Not Feasible

Even so, some requests cannot be fulfilled because of the physical condition of the patient or because there is too little time.

One woman, for example, requested a three-day cruise to Mexico, but because she was confined to a wheelchair, she could not have made the trip.

A 27-year-old man asked to meet his idol, Paul McCartney. Quiet Dreams reached McCartney’s manager and made the request, but two weeks later, before McCartney was able to reply, the man died.

“That was going to be our biggest challenge,” Lewis said, “but he died too soon.”

Another young woman also died before her dream could be realized. She had wanted to have her poems printed in books and to give them to her closest relatives and friends. Quiet Dreams had the poems printed in leather-bound books, and they were distributed.

Although it is geared to serve only Southern California for now, Quiet Dreams will not refuse requests made from other parts of the country or even from abroad.

A cancer victim in Russia has requested that Quiet Dreams arrange for her to visit relatives in Boston. It seems a Southern California relative of the victim heard about the group’s success in getting Ferdinand Ordonez to the United States from the Philippines and told her about Quiet Dreams.

“That one will be hard to fulfill because of the obvious reasons,” Dine said of the request.

If that wish is to be fulfilled, Quiet Dreams would surely require much help from the U.S. and Soviet governments. That possibility is yet to be explored.

Two other requests will be easier to fill, however. One woman wants to meet Hulk Hogan, the new rage of the professional wrestling world. Another woman, whose home is troubled by domestic violence, wants to visit relatives in Boston. Her predicament is further complicated because her son is in a coma since being injured in an accident.

“It’s not a very encouraging situation,” Lewis said, “but we will do everything we can to fulfill her last dream.”

Although Quiet Dreams still needs volunteers and a sound financial base to fulfill its goals, Dine said the organization has already achieved notable success during its first months. There seems to be little doubt that one day Quiet Dreams will help fulfill wishes of cancer patients all over the country.