Palliative and Hospice Care

I would not have survived caring for my parents at the end of their lives without the help of my hospice angels. Ma spent the final 10 days of her life in a palliative care facility; Dad endured the last three months of his life getting at-home hospice care. The individuals from hospice—nurses, occupational and physical therapists, counselors, and aides—not only supported my parents but also gave me the love and care I desperately needed.

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.