Home care turns into a home rescue for hospice aide in Murrysville

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Comforting sick and dying patients, as well as their families, is not a job suited to everyone. But after 11 years in the field, Marion Baker tells people she “has a hospice heart.”

“I would never go back to anything else. Hospice is where God wanted me,” said Baker, a hospice aide through Bridges Hospice in Monroe­ville.

A decade-plus of experience didn’t quite prepare her for the morning of Aug. 9, when a routine morning quickly devolved into Baker saving a patient from an electrical fire in his Murrysville home.

One of Baker’s elderly male patients was in the bathroom and said he heard a noise coming from the shower.

“I turned (the shower) on and didn’t hear anything,” Baker said. “I was down on the floor when I heard this popping sound and looked up.”

She saw the ceiling exhaust fan, which had caught fire, beginning to melt, directly above where her patient was sitting.

“I turned to him and said, ‘Listen, you have to get up,’ but he didn’t have his hearing aid in,” she said. “Then a hunk of the plastic fell and hit his arm. I brushed it away, and then he looked up.”

Baker said the panic in the man’s voice caused her to jump into action.

“When I worked as a certified nursing assistant at nursing homes, we went through that kind of training,” Baker said.

She hustled her patient out of the bathroom, hit one of his Help Alert buttons and tried to answer questions from the 911 operator.

“I told them, I needed to get him out of the house — it was time to go. I didn’t know what the fire was doing or where it would spread,” she said. As they were leaving the bedroom, Baker said she looked back and saw the melting fan unit fall from the ceiling.

“It was right where he’d been sitting,” she said. “I got him outside, parked his butt in the shade because it was already so hot, and reached out to his son to let him know what was going on.”

By the time the fire department arrived, Baker had gotten hold of a fire extinguisher and started dousing the flames. “I remembered what the maintenance guy who taught us said: ‘P.A.S.S. Pull, aim, sweep, secure,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly a normal day at work for Baker, but she said it was far from the biggest challenge her job presents.

“There’s a certain part of the job, when it comes to the end of life,” she said. “When that happened to me for the first time, I was scared a little bit.”

The first time Baker saw a patient through to death, it took place with family in the room.

“I knew I couldn’t show that I was scared, but that I was there for them,” she said. “That’s challenging, especially if you’ve never been around death like that before.”

Ultimately, Baker said, she finds the work rewarding “because I know in my heart I’m doing something very, very good for not just the patient, but for their families.”