Dying as she lived: Dr. Stacie Bering leaves legacy in both women’s health and palliative care

Dr. Stacie Bering was a woman who understood life and death better than most.

She delivered hundreds of babies in Spokane before multiple sclerosis took the function of her hands and pushed her into another phase of her career, caring for the dying.

“It’s universal. It’s something we all face,” Bering told The Spokesman-Review last year. “How we die, I think, should be just as important as how we live.”

Bering uplifted that principle in her own death, having a last dinner with her husband and children before slipping into a joyous sleep, said her husband, Jeffry Finer. She died Sept. 7 at 74.

Bering and her medical partner, Dr. Pam Silverstein, met while completing their residencies at Baylor.

As a resident, Silverstein recalls thinking a lot about what kind of medical practice she wanted to run. There were so few female OB-GYNs in many areas of the United States and women’s health care wasn’t treated with the respect and care they deserved, Silverstein said.

All of the other residents Silverstein met in her program weren’t the right fit. They didn’t share her values in protecting abortion rights and really listening to patient’s needs.

Then in 1978, she met Bering.

“She walked with this incredible confidence,” Silverstein said. “I thought I found a friend.”

The two quickly realized their values aligned as did their styles in the operating room.

“We found that we were really in great sync that way,” Silverstein said.

So they moved to Spokane in 1982 and became the first two female OB-GYNs in the area. They named their practice Womenhealth, all one word, hoping to make a strong statement of their values, Silverstein said.

“At the time it felt that the focus that we had was on respect for women. That extended from staff to colleagues to patients,” Silverstein said.

That respect for everyone she encountered was a core part of not only Bering’s medical practice but her life, Finer said.

One day Bering responded to the hospital for an emergency involving a pregnant woman. As she was evaluating the patient, a male doctor arrived and shoved her out of the way, Finer recalled.

Putting the patient first, Bering waited until the situation was resolved before confronting the male doctor. Once Bering explained to him who she was, he quickly apologized saying he never would have pushed her aside if he had known who she was.

Finer recalled Bering replying: “You don’t do this to anyone, not to a doctor not a nurse not to nobody

“And the nurses fell in love with her because she had no problem standing up to anyone,” Finer added.

“There was such respect to everyone in the room.”

The pair encountered controversy when an anti-abortion group, Share, began what it called “counseling” people, approaching the building where Womenhealth was located. Many patients felt harassed.

Bering’s husband was a newly minted attorney at the time and sought a temporary restraining order. The order was granted temporarily and, after numerous court hearings and ongoing protests, a permanent injunction was issued.

The ruling was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the injunction. The case, known as Bering v. Share, was a model for other states.

Bering and Silverstein strove to create a family environment in their medical practice and in the process became family to each other, along with Adie Goldberg, a social worker and counselor they hired to work with their patients.

Goldberg recalls meeting Bering at a Thanksgiving leftovers party 38 years ago.

“The person who gave the party grabbed the two of us and said, ‘I want to introduce the two of you to your new best friend,’ ” Goldberg said. “And it was an instant bond.”

The women and their families became fixtures in each other’s lives.

“We delivered each other’s babies,” Silverstein said.

Bering considered Silverstein’s and Goldberg’s kids her “bonus children.”

As parents, Finer and Bering were direct about the facts of life. She planted a bowl of condoms on the guest bathroom counter and gave their kids books sometimes a bit too mature for them to “test out” for Bering’s peer groups at Planned Parenthood when she was the medical director there.

“She was always very frank about that stuff,” Finer said.

The couple’s activism , him as a civil rights attorney and her as a feminist physician, were core to their relationship.

“What we each demanded from each other was to have lots of strong values and to live them,” Finer said.

In 1985, Bering was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis following the birth of the couple’s daughter.

By 1998, her symptoms had progressed to the point she could no longer perform operations. She quit “doctoring” in December of that year but by February 1999 as she turned 50, Bering realized she was “way too young to give up” and began looking into other specialties.

That’s when she discovered palliative care. She started a service called Pathways at Deaconess Hospital in 2005 before going on to help shape Hospice of Spokane.

Bering remained involved with Hospice of Spokane taking calls as a part-time on -call physician right up until she became a patient, Gina Drummond, CEO at Hospice of Spokane said last year.

“All these years I told patients’ families about how wonderful hospice was and how they should get hospice involved sooner so hospice can work their magic,” Bering said last year. “And you know they’re every bit as good as I said they were.”

Even after Bering went on hospice herself, she continued to serve others joining the transitions group at Rockwood, the retirement community where she lived.

As Bering struggled to leave her apartment over the last year, her work morphed into handing out a copy of one of her favorite books and saying, “Read this. Let’s talk. Come have lunch,” Finer recalled.

It was typical for Bering to find a way to adapt as MS reduced her ability to function.

When she could no longer take her 100-mile bike rides, she got a recumbent tricycle and kept going.

One time, the family was on a ski trip when Bering had an MS episode that took away her ability to ski normally, Silverstein recalled.

Instead of moping for the rest of the trip, Bering booked adaptive ski lessons, found the right gear and “learned how to ski in the next phase of skiing.”

“She would do what she needed to do to still do the things she loved doing and to be with the people she wanted to be with,” Silverstein said.

Bering taught at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine until last year.

She pushed students to think about the patient’s perspective, said Dr. Susan Hecker, who worked in case-based learning with Bering.

“That was an absolutely central thing that she would bring out,” Hecker said. “She cared deeply about her patients and she cared just as much about students, too.”

As Bering’s physical body deteriorated, she was still herself. Her children came to visit the week she died and they had a wonderful reunion, Finer said.

“She was teaching people here about death,” Finer said. “She taught us about it and then she showed us how to do it.”

In the Jewish tradition of burying the dead quickly, Bering’s celebration of life was Sept. 10. Donations in her memory could be made to Planned Parenthood or Hospice of Spokane.