Great article re: death and dying

TDCHIM · Jul 30, 2010

Brownbook, you beat me to the punch! It's definitely a terrific, thought-provoking article. I'm planning on sending a message with a link to the story to my medical ethics professor.

tencat · Jul 30, 2010

I agree leslie, but do want to say...when push came to shove and the docs were finally willing to admit they could not cure/solve/whatever...it was the nurses that made it as good of an experience as it could be given the circumstances. They were the ones who educated us on our choices. They had the stories of children coming to "meet" other children who were dying, who held my hand and laughed and cried and met me where I was in any given moment and who presented me with the memory box, the locks of hair, the hand prints. And they definitely affected our EOL decisions on that day.
I would love to see, if doctors cannot do this, a referral service to a kind of nursing specialty that this is what they do...have these conversations...and that this specialty is respected in the medical community so that when they speak to the docs about the patient's choices, the docs listen and abide. Maybe that is what hospice is supposed to be in an ideal situation and what needs to happen is docs getting better at referring to hospice and hospice getting better at letting the world know what they are all about. In our case, it was the docs who were not ready to let go and it is sad. The night before he was placed on the vent was a horrible, awful, blessed night. He was in pain and could not breathe. But he was unafraid as long as I was there, as long as we got the pain meds and helped him not to soil himself and kept the oxygen mask near his face when he could not tolerate it on his skin for a while. We were two naked souls facing the unthinkable together and that is what I wish the end had been like all the way through. It was the ultimate in intimacy. If the doctors had only been willing to let us have that, if someone at that moment had been willing to tell us it was okay to let him be done..that we weren't bad parents or giving up too soon. I don't kick myself for the decisions we made - we did the best we could. But I wish it had been different.
Anyway, I am yammering. Please don't ever think what you do doesn't affect the decisions. It can and does, perhaps more subtly at some times than others, but it does. It affected us that day...and affects me now in my journey to healing...enough that I want to be one of you.

God bless you in your journey of healing. I cannot fathom how awful going through that would be.

Hospice needs more people like you to join the ranks. Medical people have no idea what we do, so I know why the general public doesn't, either. And the sad part is, many doctors and nurses, (at least in my corner of the world) don't WANT to know.

TigerGalLE, BSN, RN · Jul 31, 2010

awesome article. Thank you

allnurses Guide · Jul 31, 2010

Medical people have no idea what we do, so I know why the general public doesn't, either. And the sad part is, many doctors and nurses, (at least in my corner of the world) don't WANT to know.

I have noticed that...why is that?? Is death really just THAT fearful for people, even those working with ill people? Nobody gets out of this world alive - it just seems so natural to me to want to provide a way to plan for a good death and to have it be part of our culture.