hospice care – Pulse

Happiness Loves Company

Suyash Jha May 31, 2024 4 Comments

I remember the first time I saw the gates of the Missionaries of Charity home for the destitute and dying, on the outskirts of my hometown, Pune, in western India.

I must have been nine or ten. To my annoyance, my parents had woken me early that Sunday morning to go with them to visit the home and bring donations of clothes and other necessities.

“How much longer, Papa?” I kept asking as we drove.

Kids Always Know

Nancy L. Glass September 1, 2023 17 Comments

This is a story about failures. First, it’s about my inability as a pediatric hospice physician to do the one most important job in this tender space. Second, it’s about well-meaning, loving parents’ inability to do their part in that job.

Jacob was a smart, funny, elementary-age kid, great with Legos.

Daring to Dream

Colette Charles December 9, 2022 7 Comments

For the past three years, I worked as a rural primary-care doctor. Two months ago, I resigned to pursue further training in hospice and palliative care. My patients were the inspiration that illuminated every step of my way towards this new path.

Marly came to me for a workup of her persistently elevated liver enzymes. Together, we navigated her new diagnosis—liver cancer—and a series of failed treatments. Eventually, Marly’s thoughts turned to facing her mortality.

A Beginner’s Touch

Karen Curran November 26, 2021 3 Comments

My husband George got to know Ruthie while he was sitting with his mom during her final days in an assisted-living facility. Ruthie, a hospice worker, was a middle-aged woman who had reentered the workforce after raising her kids. As a nursing-assistant trainee, she was learning on the job, with George’s mom, unconscious and steadily declining, as one of her first patients.

Soon after meeting Ruthie, George was struck by her lack of self-confidence.

Ghosts

Scott Janssen October 23, 2020 59 Comments

For months, as I’ve visited Evan as his hospice social worker, he’s been praying to die. In his early nineties, he has been dealing with colorectal cancer for more than four years, and he’s flat tired out. As he sees it, the long days of illness have turned his life into a tedious, meaningless dirge with nothing to look forward to other than its end. He’s done, finished. He often talks about killing himself.

On this visit, though, his depression seems to have lifted. He’s engaged and upbeat–and this sudden about-face arouses my suspicions: Has he decided to do it? Is he planning a way out?

Prayers of Passage

Jef Gamblee October 11, 2019 4 Comments

The day began in Mom’s room with a 10:00 am conference at Upper Valley Medical Center, west of Columbus, Ohio. In attendance were my ninety-three-year-old mother Joanne (now in her third week of hospitalization), her palliative-care nurse Richard, her Episcopal priest Mother Nancy and myself.

Mom was on high-flow oxygen therapy delivered through a nasal cannula. Despite this, her blood-oxygen levels were well below normal. Clearly, her lung function was declining. Her heart wasn’t pumping well, and her blood pressure was barely seventy over fifty.

Things can change quickly with our elders. Thirty days earlier, Mom was going to dinner with friends and taking excursions in her assisted-living facility’s van to pick up things she needed, including small bottles of wine to share

Fear No Evil

Scott Janssen January 12, 2018 11 Comments

Scott Janssen ~

“You need to get here now!” The nurse whispers anxiously. It’s after midnight. One of our hospice patients has just died at home, and her husband is threatening to shoot himself when the funeral home shows up.

“Has the funeral home been called?” I ask.

“No.”

“Does he have a gun or weapon?”

“We’re out in the country. There are deer heads on the wall.”

I try not to stereotype, but deer heads are a giveaway. There are probably lots of guns.

Learning the Meaning of Care

Alexander Gunn April 10, 2017 No Comments

I was nervous. I had never been this close to someone who was about to die. I introduced myself, but the patient was non-responsive. I told her that I was going to sit with her and that I would stay for a few hours. As I sat down, I noticed her breathing–it was irregular, and each breath sounded like she was slowly and painfully drowning. Almost trying to distract myself from her breathing, I studied her face. The structure of her face–her jaw- and cheekbones–was well defined. My eyes wandered from her head to her shoulders and along her arms, and then I saw her hands.

Hope in a Hopeless Place

Paula Mahon December 25, 2016 No Comments

In 2008 my father was committed to a long-term care facility, and our family visited him daily. We testified to the nursing home staff of the funny, smart, kind and generous man he once was.

Go Ask Alice

Ellen Rand February 27, 2015 10 Comments

Ellen Rand

In 2010, I became a hospice volunteer.

My mother had died of a brain tumor five years earlier at age eighty-seven. I saw being a hospice volunteer as a way to express my gratitude for my mother’s compassionate hospice care and to help other caregivers to weather a loved one’s passing. And, as a former reporter and writer, I thought I could help people to write their life stories, if they were interested.

In short, I wanted to act on E.M. Forster’s words, which for me sum up the goal of hospice: “Only connect.”

I soon realized, though, that by the time most people come to hospice, they’re too ill and/or too demented to carry on a conventional conversation,

Popping the Question

Mitch Kaminski January 16, 2015 34 Comments

Mitch Kaminski

Mr. Dwyer isn’t my patient, but today I’m covering for my partner in our family-practice office, so he’s been slipped into my schedule.

Reading his chart, I have an ominous feeling that this visit won’t be simple.

A tall, lanky man with an air of quiet dignity, Mr. Dwyer is eighty-eight. His legs are swollen, and merely talking makes him short of breath.

He suffers from both congestive heart failure and renal failure. It’s a medical catch-22: when one condition is treated and gets better, the other condition gets worse. His past year has been an endless cycle of medication adjustments carried out by dueling specialists and punctuated by emergency-room visits and hospitalizations.

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: hospice care

Happiness Loves Company

Kids Always Know

Daring to Dream

A Beginner’s Touch

Prayers of Passage

Learning the Meaning of Care

Hope in a Hopeless Place

Go Ask Alice

Popping the Question

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: hospice care

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