Palliative and Hospice Care

Dear readers,

My thoughts and feelings about palliative and hospice care took hold during medical school and residency training.

I was a medical student during the AIDS epidemic of the mid-1980s, when our Bronx hospital admitted a succession of patients infected with HIV, a virus that compromised their immune systems and made them vulnerable to a host of infections.

They came to the emergency room short of breath, feverish, somnolent, unable to see properly, convulsing, soiling themselves with intractable diarrhea…The list of possibilities was long and scary.

These patients, invariably young, were all going to die.