Moving Day : Patients Still Must Leave Camarillo, but Some Stay Together

John Chase hoped this day would never come.

Since learning that Camarillo State Hospital was in danger of closing, and that his daughter could be uprooted from her home of 35 years and shipped somewhere else, no one fought harder to keep the institution open.

It was a fight to save something special, Chase said, to preserve a place where his daughter had found her way and flourished. But it was a fight that all but ended Wednesday morning outside a sun-bleached, Spanish-style building known as Unit 88.

That’s where Pam Chase and the 28 other developmentally disabled patients on that unit were loaded onto vans waiting to shuttle them to a new home two hours away.

It was the first large-scale move out of the state hospital, which is scheduled to close this summer.

Citing the facility’s dwindling patient population and its spiraling costs, Gov. Pete Wilson ordered the state institution closed by June 30.

While hundreds of patients remain at Camarillo, waiting their turn to transfer to other facilities, the departure of Unit 88 ushers in a new reality for the aging sanctuary, one that pushes it well into its final days.

“I hate to admit it, but it certainly does appear to be the end,” said John Chase, who along with other parents waged a legal battle aimed at blocking the patient transfers and sparing the hospital from closure. “It’s a real shame. Every time I think about it, I just get sick.”

No group of Camarillo patients has been together longer than those on Unit 88, where some patients have lived under the same roof for decades.

Together they have celebrated birthdays and holidays, bonding as friends and becoming like family.

And together they traveled 91 miles Wednesday to the Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa, where they will start new lives in Orange County.

The transition was fraught with turbulence. It is a huge undertaking just to move so many people, and all their belongings, all at one time.

But there was more to it.

Teary-eyed hospital workers traded hugs with their favorite clients, letting them know they would be missed.

Some clients clutched stuffed animals as they shuffled through an iron gate that guards a courtyard behind the old hospital unit. One man said he didn’t want to leave, prompting workers to gather around, first to calm him and then to help him out the door.

Most patients seemed to take it all in stride. But staff members said it was hard to tell how many knew they were leaving for good.

Only time will tell how they will get along in the new place, away from their routine and the people they know best.

“It broke my heart when they left this morning,” said Lauri Leach, who worked on Unit 88 for six years and accompanied the patients to Fairview to help them get settled. “These guys are like family. It was really hard to say goodbye.”

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Across the sprawling state hospital campus, such scenes are likely to play out over and over as the 60-year-old institution empties out room by room, unit by unit.

Last week marked the beginning of the largest wave of transfers, with more than 60 patients scattered to other facilities over a three-day period. Thirty more are scheduled to leave Camarillo this week.

Most of those who left last week are mentally retarded clients funneled to Fairview.

A handful of mentally ill patients also moved to other state facilities or community care programs.

Oxnard resident Leo O’Hearn removed his schizophrenic son, Steven, from Camarillo State on Wednesday, placing him in a program close to home rather than allowing him to transfer to a state facility 80 miles away.

Steven O’Hearn arrived at the state hospital two decades ago. On Wednesday, he was the last to leave his unit, now a shell of the place that helped pluck him from a world of delusion and hallucination.

“It was good while it lasted; it provided the care he needed,” said the elder O’Hearn, a retired lawyer. “But now to cut the cord completely, that’s a pretty hard thing to accept.”

Leo O’Hearn, 71, still clings to some hope that at least a portion of the hospital campus will be set aside to treat those patients with families in the immediate area.

He knows it’s a longshot. But right now, it’s the only shot he has. “You could assume in the past that there would at least be a place for people like my son,” he said. “But not anymore. The state is doing away with all that.”

The state is facing a new reality of its own.

The closure of Camarillo State reflects a nationwide trend toward community care programs rather than the warehousing of patients in hospitals and institutions.

It also reflects a change in California policy, spurred by a class-action lawsuit that forced a sharp reduction of patients in the state’s developmental centers and the spending of millions of dollars more for services for those who live outside institutional care.

Finally, it reflects Camarillo State’s dwindling patient population and the high cost of caring for state hospital patients, about $114,000 a year per patient at the Camarillo facility.

“All of those reasons are what drove us to recommend Camarillo for closure,” said Doug Arnold, chief deputy director of the Department of Developmental Services in Sacramento.

“We have attempted, I think, to take into account all of the parents’ concerns,” he added.

That is of little comfort to Marcie Flannery, whose 58-year-old son, Page Dye, was sent to Fairview on Tuesday after living nearly half his life at Camarillo.

Dye was among the first patients on his unit to move out. Hours before he arrived at Fairview, Flannery was already there, speaking with caseworkers and the director of the program where her son would be housed.

It was not an easy time. Her eyes were red and swollen because she had been crying a good part of the morning. She was weak, wrung out with emotion. Her hands shook as she tried to put words to her fear and anger.

“I am desperate. I am a desperate mother trying to keep my son safe,” she said.

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For people who thrive on structure and routine, change does not come easily.

That’s why the parents of patients on Unit 88 fought so hard to ensure that the entire ward--these longtime friends and pseudo-family members--would be able to transfer together.

When those patients showed up at Fairview on Wednesday, they were met by dozens of parents who had arranged a picnic to welcome them. Stacks of pizzas and buckets of soda were laid out in a courtyard behind their new second-story hospital unit.

Fairview staff members circulated among the new clients, getting to know their new charges. The shrieks and howls of excited patients echoed through the courtyard.

Lisa Luban, 41, a 20-year resident of Unit 88, hugged anyone within reach.

Jennifer Campbell and her father, Andrew, ate lunch together on a picnic table under an umbrella, a yellow balloon bobbing above their heads.

Karleen Allen brought new quilts and pillows for her daughter Judy, who had been at Camarillo for three decades, and each of her new roommates. Down the hall, John Chase and his wife, Barbara, helped Pam Chase settle into her new room.

They hung family pictures and stocked her closet, piling in clothes and shampoo and a plastic container jingling with bracelets. She chattered away, helping to stock items and asking where things should go.

And when it was time to leave, John and Barbara Chase hugged their daughter and promised to return soon. Now that moving day had come and gone, they hoped that she and the others would settle in without too many problems.

“We’re just keeping our fingers crossed,” John Chase said. “As difficult as it is to leave your child to a somewhat uncertain and unknown future, this is the best we can provide for her.”