Hospice Care: Help During End Stages of Life
…We knew Dad was wearing down. He didn’t have long to live, but did he have to be in such discomfort? I wanted him under hospice care, but the doctor was adamant that he still wasn’t ready.
One day while I was working at my newspaper job, the phone rang. It was the head nurse at Dad’s nursing home.
“Carol, we did it!” she said. “Your father’s going on hospice. Can the provider call you at work? If you can do the paperwork now, then we’ll get him started.”
A hospice social worker called me at work and even came up to my office for the initial interview. I did the paperwork and met the hospice representatives at Dad’s nursing home later that day.
After we won the fight for hospice, my main concern became how to tell Mom. Hospice means impending death to most people. And, of course, that is what they do—they help people die naturally while minimizing bothersome symptoms (like pain) as much as possible. However, telling my mother that Dad was going on hospice would be difficult. I even asked the social worker if we could “skip that part”! I can’t believe I asked that, but I wanted to…
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