Look Directly at What Frightens You
The greatest barrier to accessing high quality care at the end of life is a fear of what is BELIEVED to be true about hospice. Learning the truth can open doors to an experience that is beautiful and focused on comfort, peace and love .
Hospice is Life, not Death
“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
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Thanks for joining me! As a hospice nurse of more than 15 years, I started this blog as a way to share stories of my experiences, to encourage others to think about death as a normal event in a human life and to prepare for it with information that is factual, not based on fear,…
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Why You Need Hospice Early This week, my team encountered yet another situation where a patient needed hospice care STAT! If you don’t know, STAT in the healthcare world means immediately, as fast as it can happen, urgent! It means that the request needs a response with no delays and that delay will likely cause a…
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Almost every week, my hospice team admits a patient to our service who has a terminal prognosis of approximately 6 months or less but isn’t having active symptoms at the time of admission. When the admission nurse tells the family that our team is going to coordinate with the pharmacy to send out a comfort pack…
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Know Your Rights Recently, I became aware of a patient who was dissatisfied by the service she was receiving from the hospice company she had chosen for her care. Her specialty MD had tried every possible treatment and the disease was not responding. The patient was becoming sicker and weaker and had decided to choose…
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There is a time in the healthcare journey when rehabilitation therapies are amazing. They can work miracles for patients whose bodies show the potential for recovery and recuperation after an illness or injury that has left the patient deconditioned or lacking the level of functioning that they had prior to being sick or hurt. Physical therapists…
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Worst Case Scenario A colleague told me a story this week that made me shake my head. An elderly man was admitted to the hospital with pain in his upper right abdomen that had become unbearable. In the ER, it was determined that he had stones in his gall bladder and one was lodged in…
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I stood at the side of the bed, just at the shoulder of this tiny little Irish-American lady. She had snow-white hair, and other evidence of age was in her curved spine, wrinkled hands, and paper-thin skin. She was holding her husband’s hand and stroking his hair away from his forehead. Their grown children stood…
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No, it was not the morphine that made the patient pass. No, the patient didn’t die because the hospice nurse gave the patient a dose of morphine. No, the patient’s death wasn’t caused when the hospice started morphine. No, patient’s don’t die on hospice because morphine is prescribed. No hospices don’t give patient’s morphine to…
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It is yours. You have already paid for it. Let me explain. The first modern hospice care was created by Dame Cicely Saunders in 1967. Saunders was a British registered nurse whose chronic health problems forced her to pursue a career in medical social work. The relationship she developed with a dying Polish refugee helped solidify her ideas that terminally ill patients…
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The Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine have issued statements highlighting that artificial hydration and nutrition near the end of life do not prolong life or increase comfort but can cause discomfort and complications. They suggest trusting the body’s natural dehydration process which prepares us for the…
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So many times I have heard families say they wish they had known about hospice sooner. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. But I have often thought about this and my own experience with looking back and wishing I had known then what I know now. The experience changed my life, my career, my outlook on…
Hospice is Not a Dirty Word 