St. Charles Madras is excited to announce that it has completed the third and final phase of its hospital remodel and expansion. Starting Dec. 11, the new main entrance off A Street is open to all patients and visitors.

The third and final phase of the renovation project included expanding the laboratory, enhancing the hospital entrance and parking areas, and connecting the new central registration and waiting area with the older part of the hospital.

“It’s so exciting to finish a project that we promised to the community,” said John Bishop, president of St. Charles Madras and St. Charles Prineville. “The additions and changes we’ve made to our hospital are truly going to enhance the quality and safety of patient care and serve Jefferson County and beyond for many years to come.”

The news media are invited to tour the newly open areas on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 2 p.m. with Bishop, starting in the new central registration and waiting area.

In 2014, the St. Charles Board of Directors approved the $16 million project, which has added 26,000 square feet to the facility and enhanced outpatient and primary care services. The 25-bed critical access hospital—which serves 21,000 people in Madras and surrounding communities—was built in 1967 and did not meet standards of care when St. Charles acquired it through an asset transfer in 2013. The transaction included a significant infusion of capital into the hospital for the much-needed facility upgrades.

As part of the same project, the St. Charles Madras Emergency Department was expanded and enhanced, and a new surgical suite and Imaging department were constructed, all of which were completed last summer.

“We can all be very proud of this upgraded and renovated hospital, which offers quality health care close to home,” said Mack Gardner, a Madras resident and St. Charles Health System board member. “We can certainly thank those community visionaries back in the mid 1960s and subsequent hospital boards who all laid the ground work for today’s 21st century Madras hospital.”

The Madras community is invited to attend a ribbon cutting ceremony Jan. 12 celebrating the completion of the two-year project. The ceremony will be held in the new central registration and waiting area of St. Charles Madras at 8 a.m.

About St. Charles Health System
St. Charles Health System, Inc., headquartered in Bend, Ore., owns and operates St. Charles Bend, Madras, Prineville and Redmond. It also owns family care clinics in Bend, Madras, Prineville, Redmond and Sisters. St. Charles is a private, not-for-profit Oregon corporation and is the largest employer in Central Oregon with more than 4,200 caregivers. In addition, there are more than 350 active medical staff members and nearly 200 visiting medical staff members who partner with the health system to provide a wide range of care and service to our communities.

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Hospitals care for the sick. Churches care for the soul. But in hard times, the two can clasp hands to catch those tumbling through the gap in the middle. That's what happened during the Great Depression. Lowell Jensen, a former board member of St. Charles, remembered.

"There were 150 to 200 people riding the rails going north and going south looking for work and getting with their families to try to live," Jensen said. "I remember then what that hospital did. It was Father Luke Sheehan, of course."

At the height of the Depression, the area along Franklin Avenue between the railroad tracks and present-day Third Street was undeveloped. People riding the rails camped there. The good father took pity.

"They put a sign up there that they could get food at St. Charles Hospital, and of course, some of them would filter down into town," Jensen said. "Then the Chamber of Commerce came to Father Luke and said they wanted to take that sign down.

"Father Luke said, 'You leave that sign up. They're not bums, they're people who need help.' And so he said they were going to feed them as long as they're hungry. You'd see 30, 40, sometimes 50 people lined up every morning."

The sisters of St. Charles Hospital served meals through the Depression.

Tucked between the mountains and the high desert, Bend in 1918 lay hidden from much of the outside world.

But isolation wouldn’t be enough to shield the booming lumber town from the Spanish influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919. By some accounts, the toll from the fast-killing illness surpassed even the “Black Death” plaque of 1347-1351, making it the worst epidemic in history.

It would be the first big test for the newly arrived nuns of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana, and the little Bend hospital they had taken over. Before the end of the year, the hospital would overflow with flu victims and the community would press the Bend Amateur Athletic Club (now the Boys and Girls Club) into service as a temporary hospital.

Among the victims in Central Oregon was Bend mayor, S.C. Caldwell, who died Jan. 8, 1919, while in Vancouver, Wash., the Bend Bulletin reported.

The deadly virus cropped up during the final year of World War I. It first showed up in Asia and Europe, picking up the name Spanish flu because it allegedly killed 8 million people there in May 1918.

The war, with its massive movements of men, helped spread the virus around the globe. The virus moved rapidly throughout developed nations wherever rail lines carried people. It first appeared in the United States among soldiers at a Kansas Army base in March 1918, but didn’t hit with full force until autumn.

In Central Oregon, 44 Deschutes County residents died out of 174 document cases in 1918, according to the Annual Reports of the Oregon State Board of Health. That same year, Crook County lost seven people out of 100 cases and Jefferson County saw two deaths from 64 cases. In 1919, 14 people died in Deschutes County, three in Crook and one in Jefferson.

The fall of 1918, the Bend Bulletin issued a call for volunteers to help at the makeshift hospital and with homebound illness around town. According to a 1917 business directory, Bend had seven physicians. They, along with the five Sisters of St. Joseph couldn’t keep up. On Nov. 11, 1918, the paper reported, “Spanish influenza cases are being treated at the emergency hospital, over 30 cases being reported at the institution this morning. Although the help situation is somewhat improved over last week, there is still a shortage and more men and women are being appealed to to give their time in aiding to care for the patients who are already there.”

Besides a shortage of beds and medical personnel, they had no proper medicine to relieve patients.

“The only drugs available were quinine, camphorated oil and moonshine whiskey,” recalled Jim Donovan, who managed Lumbermans Hospital in Bend after the sisters took over the Bend Hospital.

Yet Donovan saw a bright side amid the illness and grief, calling it “one of my most heartwarming experiences because of the help given by the community in caring for those seriously ill.”

Among those who helped were Bend Bulletin publisher Robert Sawyer and Kathleen Rockwell, both of whom were early benefactors of St. Charles Hospital. Rockwell was better known as Klondike Kate, a famous dance hall girl who moved to Bend after entertaining miners in the Yukon Territory during the gold rush of 1897.

The square clapboard house at 81 Oregon Street fit only a few patients. Surgery was done in the kitchen. Its only nurse lived in half the tiny building with her husband and five kids.

But in 1908 when George and Fern Hall moved to Bend, there was nothing resembling even a clinic. The town’s only doctor, Urling Coe, MD, ran his practice from a buggy and a few hand bags.

Yet Mrs. Hall’s little hospital was a seed from which St. Charles Health System grew. A handful of other small hospitals came and went through the first half of the 1900s. None, however, left the same legacy.

Fern Hall wasn’t a school-trained nurse. She had no degrees or certificates. She learned her profession on the job, becoming what was called a practical nurse. In Coe’s memoir, “Frontier Doctor: Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West,” he writes she was perfect for the job.

“She was one of those rare individuals born to be a nurse: energetic, hard-working, sweet-tempered, levelheaded and kind-hearted, and she loved nursing,” Coe wrote.

Between epidemics of typhoid fever, a baby boom and many grisly injuries, the demands were more than one man with a medical bag and a horse could handle.

“We did not have all of the equipment that even a small hospital should have, but Mrs. Hall knew how to get along with little, and her whole heart and soul were in the work, and that is what counts,” Coe wrote.

In the spring of 1909, Dr. Barnard Ferrell, joined Coe in practice and worked in Hall’s hospital. Bend quickly outgrew the hospital. When Hall moved to Portland in 1914, Coe and Ferrell took it over. They moved the hospital to a remodeled house at 930 Broadway, now called Brooks Street. On April 15, 1915, the Bend Bulletin reported on the new hospital. The story made a comment without elaboration about the future.

“It is understood that arrangements are being made to have one of the nursing orders of the Catholic Church establish a branch here and that when this is done the hospital will be turned over to the sisters for operation,” the paper reported.

When Neil Harrison was born, he weighed in at a mere 930 grams--or slightly more than a pound and a half. The son and first child of Deborah and Will Harrison, Neil was--at the time--the youngest surviving baby to be born at St. Charles Bend. Even by modern standards of neonatal care, Neil’s chance of survival at that early age would only be 80 percent, and he’d be faced with a 75 percent chance of a long-term disability.

What’s so most remarkable, then, about Neil’s birth story was the year in which he was born: 1982.

At 26 weeks pregnant, Deborah Harrison called her doctor to let her know she wasn’t feeling well. Though she didn’t realize it at the time, she was having symptoms of labor. Her doctor recommended that she immediately check-in at St. Charles.

“I was in complete denial and shock,” said Deborah. “I kept thinking, ‘I’m 26 weeks, I cannot be in labor.’”

For three days, a team of doctors and nurses worked around the clock to prevent Deborah from having her baby so soon.

“Anyone involved in my case was there all the time checking in on me, talking through all the possibilities,” she recalled. “They said, ‘We’ve never delivered a baby this young.  But we’ll do everything we can.’”

Doctors’ prediction for Neil was grim: the odds were 50-50 that he’d survive being born at 26 weeks.

After three days of labor, Deborah’s health began to deteriorate. Her doctors recommended that she be flown to a children’s hospital in Portland, which was better equipped to deal with premature babies. But Deborah chose to stay at St. Charles.

Hours later, on May 19, Neil was born. He was whisked away to a makeshift neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, and in her utter exhaustion Deborah didn’t know whether her baby was still alive.

“All the staff was so unbelievable,” Deborah said, choking up as she recounted the story, “doing everything they possibly could to save him.”

Early on, Neil’s fragile grip on life was touch-and-go. He faced numerous complications.

“It happened on several occasions that we called in the priest,” Deborah remembered. “To this day, it’s just a miracle.”

After three months at the hospital and weighing in at 3 ½ pounds, the Harrisons were finally able to take their baby home.

Though he was a late bloomer physically and required glasses as a youngster, Neil’s record-setting birth would have few long-lasting effects on his quality of life.

The Harrisons later relocated to Portland, where Neil graduated from Sunset High School and earned an associate’s degree from Portland Community College.

Now 35, Neil says the only major complication he’s experienced as an adult was a detached retina, which he had surgically repaired when he was 20.

Even by 2018 standards, Neil’s birth remains a remarkable story of faith and determination when faced with long odds.

“Its an interesting conversation starter, that’s for sure,” said Neil. “People are just amazed by it.”

“There were four pediatricians, and they kept telling me that though they’d never saved a baby this size, they were committed to doing everything they could. They said, ‘Emmanuel was the best place to be.’ I prayed about it, and said: ‘I have faith in all of you, and I’m not leaving this hospital.’ With the quality of care I was getting, I just knew it was the right place to be. That’s why I chose not to leave.”

The Bend, Ore., Dr. Urling Coe stepped into the winter of 1905 was a world apart from anything he had experienced. Even in those days it was the type of place most people knew only from Western novels.

A year earlier the town had been platted. Now a stream of settlers was swelling it from an encampment on the banks of the Deschutes River into a wide-open boom town.

In a memoir first published in 1940, “Frontier Doctor: Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West,” Coe chronicled his experiences during the 13 years he practiced in Bend.

Coe writes half the people in Bend were living in tents. Some had come seeking work on the irrigation projects or in the town’s two small mills. Others sought land to homestead. The town had eight saloons, a couple brothels, a livery stable, one hotel and a handful of other businesses.

Coe was a 23-year-old fresh from residency and medical school at the University of Missouri and the Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati. Another physician, Dr. Charles S. Edwards, had opened an office in Bend in 1902, but he soon moved to Prineville. Two others called themselves doctors when Coe arrived, but neither was licensed to practice in Oregon, Coe wrote. The nearest modern medical facility was 160 miles away in Portland.

For his first three years, Coe provided the only skilled medical care in an area that extended 90 miles into the desert to the east, south and west and past Redmond and Camp Sherman to the north. Every patient was a house call; some could be reached only by horseback.

But for 13 years, Coe treated illnesses and injuries and delivered babies in this tremendous area. His pioneering practice is in direct lineage to St. Charles Health System, which continues to serve the same region and beyond.

Many of his patients would be emergency room cases now. Calling a doctor for minor illness or injury was something people didn’t do. Preventive medicine was out of the question, and public health measures were rudimentary. But with the hard occupations of the region, Coe found a steady business.

Shortly after arriving, he received word of a sick man north of town. He drove his wagon 24 miles along the Deschutes River. When he arrived, Coe instead found a man who had had his foot nearly torn off in a wagon accident. Not expecting a dire injury, Coe hadn’t brought surgical equipment or supplies. Improvising as he would many times, he amputated the man’s leg on the store’s back counter using a butcher’s saw.

Coe learned to carry all the equipment he could on a wagon or in saddle bags.

“I spent most of my time in the buggy rushing around among my patients scattered all over the country. There were days at a time when I did not have my clothes off or go to bed. Sometimes I fell asleep and dozed while sitting by the bedside of a patient; but most of the sleep I managed to get was in the buggy while driving,” he wrote. “… On a few occasions, however, I was rudely awakened by a team tearing madly down the road, or off through the sagebrush …”

Poor hygiene resulted in much of the illness. Each summer typhoid fever erupted in Bend. The illness was being spread by houseflies that picked it up amid the open sewers. It took several years to convince residents to enclose sewage and drinking water and to put screens on their doors.

Coe approached his medical practice as a duty that outweighed his personal needs. He treated patients not knowing whether they could or would pay. Many never did.

He tells of being called to an abandoned homestead in the desert 85 miles southeast of Bend to tend a rustler who had been shot. It was February and a storm threatened as Coe departed by wagon in the evening. He drove all night until he reached a ranch halfway to his destination. After getting breakfast, he continued by saddle horse. He rode all day. As evening fell the snowstorm hit.

“I thought of the injured man at the butte who was expecting me. He might be a horse thief for all I knew, but his life might be lost, and I would be criminally negligent if I did not go on.”

Coe’s medical practice tamed slightly after he took a partner, Dr. Barnard Ferrell, and after a woman named Fern Hall opened a small hospital on Bend’s Oregon Avenue in 1908. Coe and Ferrell took over Hall’s hospital in 1914. They moved the hospital to a larger house on what is now Brooks Street. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana, would take over that hospital in 1918 to plant the seeds of St. Charles Health System. But like the settlers he treated, Coe was a pioneer who helped clear the rocky path for those who would follow.

Coe, Urling C. M.D.; Frontier Doctor: Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West. Northwest Reprints, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, OR, 1964.

Marlis Beier moved to Bend in 1983 and provided women’s health services, including delivering babies at St. Charles Bend, as an obstetrician and gynecologist for nearly two decades.

Having completed her medical training in inner-city Detroit, Beier said that at the time, “there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen or done.” So arriving in Bend, a sleepy mill-town with a population of fewer than 20,000, was a culture shock.

Indeed, bartering for health care services seems like a practice that went out of style long before the 1980s. Not in Bend, she said.

“When I first came to Bend it was a much smaller community,” she said. “As physicians and clinicians, we just took care of everybody. We didn’t ask how much money or insurance they had.”

On several occasions Beier received non-monetary forms of payment for her services, including a hand-woven embroidery for a hysterectomy, and eggs and firewood for delivering a baby.

One winter morning she was due to perform a scheduled Caesarean section on a patient at the hospital, but awoke to a fresh dumping of snow.

“That morning, our entire driveway was plowed by (the patient’s) husband,” she said. “He wanted to make sure I was there on time for his baby.”

Beier holds the distinction of performing the first-ever C-section on what was then the labor and delivery floor, the hospital’s fifth floor. Back then, she said, C-sections and anesthesia took place on different floors.

She recalls a case in which a child inside its mother’s womb was barely clinging to life, and there were only minutes to act.

“There wasn’t enough time to get downstairs to perform the C-section or to get to anesthesia. So I did the first C-section ever done upstairs with a circumcision set and local anesthesia.”

She said she often sees this baby, now a grown man, around town. After Beier’s life-saving decision, she said C-sections were moved to the same floor as labor and delivery.

Beier, a founding physician of the still-thriving East Cascade Women’s Group, describes her career in women’s health as the “love of my life.”

“It’s such an honor to be part of people’s lives at such an intimate time.”

Though settlement of Oregon’s high desert had begun more than 50 years earlier, the region St. Charles now serves was raw when the first doctors and nurses came to Bend.

Work of the time – logging, ranching and canal building – was dangerous. Men and women suffered horrible injuries far from medical help. Sanitation and immunization were in their infancy.

A handful of physicians and Catholic sisters trained as nurses came to Bend, Oregon to provide care where the need was greatest. They had to be tough and resourceful.

The roots of St. Charles Health System start here. The era saw the area’s first hospital in 1908 – a house whose kitchen served as an operating room. And it saw the arrival in Bend of five young nuns from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana.

“They have all the fervor or youth and seem not to be afraid of the pioneer conditions,” said Father Luke Sheehan, about the first Sisters of St. Joseph in Bend.

During the 1940s, then superior and administrator of St. Charles Hospital, Sister Blanche Ress was able to get the community to help build a new St. Charles Memorial Hospital. Less than three decades before that same community had an active Ku Klux Klan whose invective was aimed largely at Catholics.

“It was because of her that we did get the people behind us to build in the 1940s,” said Sister Catherine Hellmann years later.

Sister Blanche came to Bend in the last days of 1917. She was among the first five Sisters of St. Joseph who left their convent in Tipton, Indiana, to establish a Catholic hospital in what was then a very remote area. Like the others, she knew it would be a long-term commitment. She ended up serving at the hospital until 1952.

For 17 years, from 1935 to 1952, she served as the hospital’s superior and administrator. To date, hers is the second longest tenure in that position, surpassed only by Sister Catherine’s 20 years.

Sister Blanche’s legacy is more than longevity or the ability to get community support, however. In many ways, she established the character of St. Charles’ hospitals. The institution was founded on the principles of the Catholic Church and her order. But the human touch, the philosophy that all patients must be treated with dignity and respect was ingrained through Sister Blanche.

“Her spirit has carried on. You plant those values, that spirit, and it carries on,” Hellmann said. “Even without the sisters there, the spirit of love and compassion continued in that place.”

Hellmann said Sister Blanche served as her role model when she came to St. Charles as a young nurse in 1948.

“Everything came from the heart. She was willing to do anything she could to help us,” Hellmann said. “I just thought she was the most wonderful person I ever worked with.”

Sister Blanche continued to be a role model for Hellmann when she returned to Bend to become administrator of St. Charles in 1969.

“When I came here, I often thought about how Sister Blanche would do it,” Hellmann said. “I went to her grave several times when it got tough and said ‘what would you do?’”

Sister Blanche’s words still greet people who enter the lobby of St. Charles Bend:

“The doors of St. Charles shall never be locked against anyone in need of service."

On a cold, bright sunny afternoon in 1917, five nuns boarded the Pennsylvania Railroad at Kokomo, Indiana and headed west.

It was Christmas Day, but the women had a rendezvous to keep. Their itinerary had been forged through nearly a decade of letters and conversations between a frontier Cupuchan priest named Father Luke Sheehan and two mothers superior of their order, the Sisters of St. Joseph.

They were leaving the familiar surroundings of their convent at Tipton, Indianan, and their three-year-old hospital at nearby Kokomo for an obscure logging town called Bend, Oregon. It was a 10-year assignment at minimum with little chance of returning home before then. Some never would.

Later writings would refer to these sisters who helped found St. Charles Health System as pioneers. It was more than poetics. What they faced was a raw logging town only a decade or two removed from the Wild West.

Bend had about 4,500 people living along mostly dirt streets at the beginning of 1918. Its fortunes swelled and shrank, often depending on weather conditions for logging. Most men had hard, dangerous jobs – logging, mill work, ranching and farming. Women faced childbirth without the medical care we take for granted. Typhoid fever, dysentery and influenza were common.

The “hospital” the sisters were to take over was a small wooden building along the banks of the Deschutes River where the city’s Mirror Pond parking lot now sits. With 14 beds, it couldn’t keep up with the injuries generated by the two mills, the Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon companies, let alone with all the illnesses and injuries inherent in life in those harder times.

The nuns who came to Bend were Sisters Theresa Thistlewaite, De Sales Burns, Evangelista McKenzie, Blanche Ress and Brendan Donegan. Little is recorded about these women as individuals or about their daily lives, but one anecdote tells volumes about their mission.

Shortly after arriving in Bend on Dec. 28, 1917, the sisters visited the facility they were to take over on Jan. 1, called the Bend Hospital. Drs. Urling Coe and Barnard Ferrell had opened it in 1915 to replace the one Fern Hall started. They had hired Mr. and Mrs. Jim Donovan to manage it.

They had also contracted with the Shevlin-Hixon Company to treat injured mill workers. Jim Donovan reportedly informed the sisters they were to treat only mill employees.

“When the sisters took it over, they were told they could only take care of the workers and we said, ‘No, we take care of everyone or we take care of no one,’” said Sister Catherine Hellmann, years later. “They only took care of the workers to keep them working, and in those days lumbering there were a lot of injuries.”

Hellmann, who became the hospital’s administrator in 1969, wasn’t there in the early days but she worked with some of the original sisters when she first came to St. Charles in 1948. Donovan backed down to the strong-willed sisters. The hospital opened its doors to everyone.

The Bend Bulletin reported the changes taking place in the first weeks of 1918, “Today the Bend Hospital begins the New Year under the management of Catholic nursing sisters … Since their arrival, they have moved into the hospital and are now completing arrangements for the accommodation of twice the number of patients formerly cared for … Instead of providing patients principally for mill employees, the Sisters will take in patients from the city at large. Remodeling of the interior of the building has provided space for 28 beds instead of the original 14.”

The expansion came just in time for the great flu epidemic of 1918.

Upon meeting them, Father Sheehan remarked in a letter to the Rev. Charles O’Reilly, Bishop of the Baker Diocese, “From what I saw and heard about these Sisters, they are excellent for the needs of the diocese. They have all the fervor of youth and seem not to be afraid of the pioneer conditions.”

That would turn out to be important. For years, the sisters labored without pay. They subsisted partly on the chickens, eggs and occasional side of beef many of their impoverished patients used to pay hospital bills, and tended a vegetable garden.

Far from considering this life a hardship, Sister Evangelista, writing about her experiences in 1950, looked back upon those years as an adventure. The trip west glowed in her mind. She recalled with humor five nuns bunking in three berths on the three-day trip west. And the excitement of what lay ahead echoed in her description of the country.

“The Rocky Mountains were wonderful to see, however, they do not compare to the Cascade Ranges in size and scenery. We were thrilled with their huge massive peaks, waterfalls, canyons, rivers. The natural scenery which almost beggars description,” she wrote.