Reply to What were the benefits of going on hospice?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If I were in lots of pain on oxygen could not walk and had trouble breathing (assuming. No hope of recovery). I would want pain relief.  It does not sound like that medication is providing much quality of life!  Hospice kept my Dad comfortable till the end.  We were grateful for that [/quote]

OP here, really appreciate all the feedback! There is definitely no hope of recovery here. The medication is ofev and it's for pulmonary fibrosis. I think if he went off it, it would make breathing even more difficult than it already is. I'm wondering logistically why hospice doctors would be able to provide better pain relief than regular doctors though. Are hospice doctors just more willing to provide morphine because there is less of a liability issue? [/quote]

My father got regular morphine injections with hospice.  They told us morphine made breathing easier.  He never struggled to breathe..he just stopped.[/quote]

Same here. My father was out of pain, but personally I felt like they gave him morphine until it was at a level that he passed away. He was lucid when he went into hospice but rapidly deteriorated and was not lucid once there. I have mixed feelings about it. [b]One the one hand, he wasn't it pain and he would have had an awful quality of life if he stayed alive. On the other, I felt like they accelerated his death.[/b] [/quote]

Not picking on you poster, and my condolences on the loss of your dad.

What you said is at the heart of hospice versus regular medical care, and the weird psychological stuff that comes into play from patient and family members.

Regular medical care is built to aggressively treat disease, even terminal disease. As someone who worked more than a decade in the medical field and mostly around terminally ill patients, I’ve met many doctors, even oncologists, who just don’t accept death as the natural part of life that it is. Many of these doctors push patients to the outer limits of treatment before ‘letting’ them accept their fates - and yes there is a lot of weird manipulation that happens because most people put doctors on pedestals.

You recognize that your dad’s quality of life was terrible and staying alive it was not going to improve. But you are suspicious that hospice caregivers helped him die quicker.

Well, they very likely did. Not by killing him, but by not hounding him to continue with aggressive intervention on terminal illness.

Some people just struggle a lot more with death than others. Most people who work in hospice as I did for most of the last decade are more comfortable recognizing that death is a natural transition and do everything to help patients release fear and anxiety about death and to experience that transition with the greatest ease and comfort possible. Death is a sweet escape for people suffering incurable illnesses and terrible quality of life which medicine cannot cure or fix.

I hope our society and our medical system works harder in future generations to talk about death and demystify end of life and help families to really support their loved ones on that journey instead of so many people dying in hospitals after the failure of many very expensive and hopeless aggressive interventions.[/quote]

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