How Dr's Die-Article from NY times

monkeybug · Nov 21, 2013

I was pleasantly surprised at the choices my mother, aunts and uncles made for my grandfather (and considering there were 10 of them, any consensus was difficult enough). He suffered a stroke in his brain stem, was given clot busters, actually woke up (I got to hear him tell me he loved me one more time), and then had a hemorrhagic stroke a week later. They made the choice to take him to inpatient hospice and provide him with pain medication only. No feeding tube, no vent, no invasive procedures. There were still some bumps in the road, like trying to explain to one aunt why the hospice nurses weren't testing his blood sugar. Oddly enough, in a family that size (at the time of his death there were 106 of us from grandparents on down) I was the ONLY medical person in the family. The hospice staff cared for him, and us, superbly. They coped with the sheer volume of us with grace. We couldn't have asked for a better experience for him or us, whether it was from housekeeping, the chaplain, the nurses, or the volunteers.

We did catch flack, though. My grandfather was one of those pillars of the community. Deacon of the church, very well-respected by all. And as such, many people felt they had the right to offer opinions. I nearly cursed out my own father-in-law (a member of grandfather's church) when I overheard him in the waiting room of the hospice opining to other church members that we were starving him to death. He wasn't the only person who felt that way. Apparently to some, if you aren't doing "all that can be done" you might as well be smothering your loved one with a pillow.