Medical aid in dying is the ultimate religious freedom

Under current law, people who have made every life decision based on their personal values and faith suddenly become, due to a terminal illness, a victim of someone else’s theology. 

By Harlan Limpert

My Uncle Don died in his mid-60s after a two-year struggle with cancer. He was one of my favorites, an adult with whom I could discuss topics I couldn’t even mention to my parents. As a kid I’d often ride my bike to his home in Richfield with assurance of getting some cookies, Rice Krispies bars or a similarly unhealthful snack.

So when in college I learned he had lung cancer, I was heartbroken. Like so many cancer patients, he “fought the good fight” — chemo, surgery, radiation. Despite all the treatments, the disease was winning.

One day, after returning from one of countless doctor appointments, he walked into his bedroom, pulled out a gun and shot himself. My aunt, hearing the shot from the kitchen, lived another 20 years with that horrendous memory.

My uncle accepted some comfort care but would not succumb to the cancer robbing him of his humanity. He wanted to die as he had lived, on his own terms. But at that time, medical aid in dying (MAID) wasn’t legal. I have no doubt that, after realizing the futility of further treatment, Uncle Don would have taken advantage of MAID, which enables a mentally competent adult suffering from a terminal illness to request from their physician medication that will end life peacefully. Medical aid in dying has been legal in Oregon for 20 years since that state’s’ passage of its Death with Dignity law and is now legal in seven more states, including California.

Many of us know of someone suffering from a terminal illness. Most often they are willing to fight like hell for as long as possible but in the end pray for a gentle, painless death.

For decades, Gallup Polls have shown that a majority of Americans support medical aid in dying as an end-of-life option. Twenty state legislatures, including Minnesota’s, have introduced bills similar to Oregon’s Death with Dignity law. But, despite widespread support, lawmakers are reluctant to act. Why? Despite the overwhelming support of people of faith, some religious leaders are fighting it, insisting that Americans die by what they call a “natural death.” Suffering, they argue, is redemptive (“to change for the better”). Even the loved ones surrounding the dying person, it is believed, are changed — redeemed — by the experience.

Other people of faith — me included — see nothing redemptive about needless suffering. In fact, needless suffering is cruel and pointless. The proper religious response to suffering is to alleviate it, to show compassion to the one who is suffering. And there is nothing “natural” about being connected to numerous tubes injecting futile drugs into a dying person’s veins when that person would prefer her suffering to end. There is nothing natural about a respirator providing oxygen to a person whose clear intention was to have a good death, one surrounded by loved ones and absent of unnecessary suffering.

National Religious Freedom Day was Jan. 16. For at least 25 years, U.S. presidents have issued annual proclamations acknowledging and celebrating the many faiths that exist within our country. They have reminded us of our cherished legacy of religious liberty. They recall how Thomas Jefferson penned the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786, which inspired the words of the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the free exercise of religion.

But when it comes to end-of-life care, an individual’s personal religious freedom is limited by current law. People who have made every life decision for decades based on their personal values and faith suddenly become, due to a terminal illness, a victim of someone else’s theology. The arena of life that is most personal and profound often has people with different religious values determine our options. At end of life, one’s personal values and spiritual beliefs ought to take priority over everything else.

Passing legislation to allow medical aid in dying in Minnesota will enable end-of-life options to be decided by an individual’s values and spiritual beliefs and no one else. Those who choose medical aid in dying can do so. Those who do not would not be affected.

As National Religious Freedom Day is celebrated, let us remember to honor religious freedom and show compassion to those wishing to end their suffering.

Complete Article HERE!

The Doctors Who Invented a New Way to Help People Die

The two lethal medications used by terminal patients who wish to end their own life recently became unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

Youssef Cohen, a right-to-die advocate with an incurable cancer, rides to a doctor’s appointment in New York with his wife in 2016.

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In 2016, a small group of doctors gathered in a Seattle conference room to find a better way to help people die. They included physicians at the forefront of medical aid in dying—the practice of providing terminal patients with a way to end their own life. And they were there because the aid-in-dying movement had recently run into a problem. The two lethal medications used by most patients for decades had suddenly become either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. When doctors briefly tried a substitute, some patients had rare but troubling experiences.

The Seattle group hoped to discover a different drug. But the practicalities of aid in dying, a controversial policy still illegal in most of the United States, are not like those in other medical fields. “There’s lots of data on stuff that helps people live longer, but there’s very little data on how to kill people,” says Terry Law, a participant at the meeting and one of the most frequently used aid-in-dying doctors in the U.S.

Seven states—including Hawaii, where a law took effect on January 1—and the District of Columbia now allow doctors to write lethal prescriptions for qualifying, mentally capable adults who have a terminal illness. And support for the practice has gained new national momentum after the widely publicized death of Brittany Maynard, a young cancer patient who moved to Oregon in 2014 to take advantage of that state’s aid-in-dying law.

But the public remains deeply conflicted about the laws—as does the medical community itself. No medical association oversees aid in dying, and no government committee helps fund the research. In states where the practice is legal, state governments provide guidance about which patients qualify, but say nothing about which drugs to prescribe. “Nowhere in the laws is there any sort of guidance for how to do it. There is no oversight to make sure that it’s happening in a safe way, apart from annual reports and kind of a face-value annual hearing,” says Laura Petrillo, a palliative-care physician who opposes legalized aid in dying.

The meeting of the 2016 group set in motion research that would lead the recipe for one of the most widely used aid-in-dying drugs in the United States. But the doctors’ work has taken place on the margins of traditional science. Despite their principled intentions, it’s a part of medicine that’s still practiced in the shadows.

On the surface, figuring out protocols for hastening death doesn’t seem complicated. Lonny Shavelson, a California physician who specializes in aid in dying, says that when he explains to patients it might take an hour or more for them to die, they’re often shocked. They tell him, “When I put down my dog, it took 10 minutes,” he says.

But veterinarians can use lethal injections on pets. In the U.S., aid-in-dying drugs must be ingested by the patient. The first proposed aid-in-dying law in Washington State would have allowed physicians to inject medications, but that legislation failed to pass. In 2008, a modified law was voted in, with an added requirement that patients self-ingest to help protect them from the possibility of family coercion.

For years, the two barbiturates widely considered the best drugs for hastening death in terminally ill patients were secobarbital and pentobarbital. These medications were painless, fast-acting, and relatively affordable. But since 2015, they’ve been largely unavailable. U.S. pharmacies stopped carrying pentobarbital approved for human use, and the price of secobarbital doubled from an already historic high after Valeant Pharmaceuticals (today known as Bausch Health) bought the manufacturing rights. A few years ago, a lethal dose cost about $200 or $300; now it can cost $3,500 or more.

To help patients who could no longer afford the drug, aid-in-dying groups sought a fix. In Washington, an advocacy organization called End of Life Washington briefly advised prescribing a drug mixture with the sedative chloral hydrate to about 70 patients. “We know this is going to put you to sleep, and we’re pretty sure it’s going to kill you,” Robert Wood, a medical director at the organization, says they told the patients. It worked, but with a tragic catch: In a few cases, the chloral hydrate burned people’s throats, causing severe pain just at the time they expected relief.

The End of Life gathering was born out of the need for a better solution. Wood enlisted three others affiliated with End of Life Washington: Law, its president; Tom Preston, a former medical director; and Carol Parrot, a retired anesthesiologist who, like Law, is one of the most experienced aid-in-dying doctors in the U.S. Others joined that meeting or later ones by telephone: a toxicologist in Iowa, a veterinarian, a pharmacologist, another anesthesiologist. The group had three main criteria, Parrot says: They wanted “a drug that would: number one, put a patient to sleep and keep them asleep; and, number two, make sure there was no pain involved; and number three, ensure that they would die, and, hopefully, die relatively quickly.” Plus, it had to be cheap. They aimed for $500 a dose.

The doctors considered a malaria medicine known to be lethal in large doses, but read that it caused severe muscle spasms in some patients. They discussed the synthetic opioid fentanyl, but were deterred by the drug’s newness and dangerous reputation. So the group decided to use a combination of medications, and eventually settled on high doses of three: morphine, diazepam—also known by its early brand name, Valium—and propranolol, a beta-blocker that slows the heart. They called the mixture DMP.

Next, the group had to test the drug. But they still didn’t have a way to follow standard procedure: There would be no government-approved clinical drug trial, and no Institutional Review Board oversight when they prescribed the concoction to patients. The doctors took what precautions they could. Patients could opt in or out, and for the first 10 deaths, either Parrot or Law would stay by the bedside and record patients’ and families’ responses.

The first two deaths went smoothly. But the third patient, an 81-year-old with prostate cancer, took 18 hours to die, Parrot says. In Oregon, where aid in dying has been legal for 20 years, the median time from taking the medication until death is 25 minutes. Patients themselves typically become unconscious in five or 10 minutes, so they are not affected by protracted times, Parrot, Wood, and Law all emphasize. But longer waiting periods can be nerve-racking for families and other caregivers, especially in the exceptional cases where these have persisted for a day or more.

Parrot and Law halted the DMP trial. The informal research group met again, this time by teleconference, and Law dug through the literature and found an article about people who purposely overdosed on digoxin, a cardiac drug. The group added it to the prescription, and the drug became DDMP.

At first, Parrot gave patients latitude in how they took this new drug combination. “One guy chugged a half a cup of Bailey’s Irish Cream, his favorite thing, after he had his medicine,” she says. “He probably took five or six hours to die.” She suspects that the fat particles in the Bailey’s slowed his gastric emptying. So the researchers checked in with each other again, and decided to increase the doses to what Parrot calls “blue-whale-sized doses.” They dubbed the modified formula DDMP2.

The drug is not a perfect aid-in-dying solution. Secobarbital is faster-acting and remains the drug of choice when patients can afford it, Wood says. Just as in the case of the barbiturates, a few outlier patients on DDMP2 take hours longer to die. And the mixture tastes extremely bitter. “Imagine taking two bottles of aspirin, crushing it up, and mixing it in less than half a cup of water or juice,” Parrot says.

Still, DDMP2 has become the low-cost solution the Seattle group set out to discover. In 2017, secobarbital was still the most commonly prescribed drug in Washington and Oregon, but in Colorado, DDMP2 was more commonly prescribed. The drug consistently accomplishes its purpose in hastening death, Parrot says: “It always works. It always, always works.”

Parrot and Wood keep track of patient data, and they continue to make discoveries. By examining medical histories of the patients who took longer to die, they’ve learned about certain risk factors for longer deaths: being on extremely high doses of painkillers such as fentanyl or morphine; being very athletic; having a compromised digestive tract. For patients who are especially risky, Parrot or Wood will sometimes offer the choice of chloral hydrate, the drug that burned some patients’ throats, although they say they carefully discuss potential problems with patients and families.

Together, Parrot and Law have written perhaps 300 lethal prescriptions over the years and observed the effects of medications on numerous patients. Neither set out to be an aid-in-dying advocate; they turned to End of Life Washington after witnessing the suffering of some dying patients. About eight years ago, Law says she was asked to prescribe lethal medications for a dying woman whose regular doctors had refused. She agreed to see the woman, and realized how difficult it was for some aid-in-dying patients to find doctors. Parrot says she was profoundly affected by the deaths of two close friends who asked her to help hasten their dying, but who lived in states where the practice was illegal. She was unable to help them, and began volunteering as an aid-in-dying doctor soon after she retired.

Most medical professionals don’t participate in aid in dying. Some physicians are concerned that their Hippocratic oath prohibits intentionally helping someone die, or that aid-in-dying requests originate from treatable pain or depression. Some worry about the broader repercussions for a society that accepts medically aiding the deaths of the terminally ill. The American Medical Association remains officially opposed.

Without the support of the rest of the profession and much of society, aid-in-dying research methods don’t fit the model of good medical research, says Matthew Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. There’s no standard protocol, no standardized data collection or independent group that monitors data and safety—all of which are intended to protect patients and help ensure the quality of the research.

The Belmont Report, which guides federal recommendations for research on human subjects, recognizes that sometimes, no satisfactory options exist for some patients, Wynia points out. In those rare cases, a doctor may want to try an innovative treatment, something for which there’s no approved research protocol. While that’s legal, clinicians are supposed to avoid turning that innovation into established practice, or doing unapproved research on numerous patients, according to Wynia. Some of the same issues exist with medical marijuana, which is legal in several states but still illegal federally. “There’s no way to fix this at the individual level,” Wynia says. “There’s no immediate answer.”

That leaves researchers like Law and Parrot in a bind. They don’t have good ways to do research and communicate what they learn. But they’ve witnessed the suffering some dying people experience, and contrast that with many peaceful deaths of patients who choose aid in dying. “These are not hard deaths,” argues Shavelson, the California physician. “These are lovely deaths.”

Shavelson says he tries to be at the bedside on the day of his aid-in-dying patients’ death. “It’s a lighter atmosphere than you think,” he says. The patient takes the first drug, which Shavelson separates out from the rest of the mixture, and then Shavelson sits down at the bedside and reads aloud questions from the state’s required report. After about 30 minutes, he asks: “Are you ready to take the medications?” He mixes the drug cocktail and the patient drinks it.

“Usually, they go silent after taking the medication,” he says. “They’ve said what they’re going to say by that time.” For a few minutes, patients usually continue to sit silently, their eyes open. “And then, very, very slowly, they’ll close their eyes.”

Shavelson asks intermittently, “Are you still there?” At first, patients usually say yes, or nod. Within five or 10 minutes, they stop responding to the question. Then Shavelson will gently touch their eyelids. “When people aren’t deeply unconscious, they’ll sort of have a twitching response,” he explains. Within 10 or 15 minutes, the twitching response disappears, and patients enter a deep coma.

Using a heart monitor, Shavelson tells caregivers as a patient’s pulse slows and oxygen levels drop. “We wait a little while, and then I say, ‘Ah, the patient’s now dead.’”

This is the first generation of patients who have consciously hastened their death with medications in this way, Shavelson says. He tells them they’re pioneers. “What a different thing, to be able to say, ‘This is the day I die,’” he says.

Complete Article HERE!

‘Cake’ Will Sweeten the Process of Dying in the Digital Age

These days, your last will and testament needs to cover more than just who gets your money and random tchotchkes. Cake takes a no-nonsense and pleasant approach to planning your inevitable demise; no gloom and doom here. Founder Suelin Chen explains.

By S.C. Stuart

A few years ago, ahead of a scheduled operation, I had to hire an attorney to draw up my last will and testament. Per the hospital’s instructions, I was also told to bring a copy of my Advance Directive, or instructions on when to pull the plug. It was scary, grown-up stuff.

As a digital native, it all felt a bit too real. I would have much preferred to sit on my couch, laptop at the ready, with an on-screen AI to talk me through the whole decision-making process and pop it up on the cloud. And that’s exactly what former healthcare executive Suelin Chen built in her Boston-based startup, Cake.

Aware that no one is thrilled about planning for the final exit—or having to talk loved ones through their own wishes—Cake is a no-nonsense online tool. You can lay out: how you’d like to go (hospice versus at home or maybe a remote cabin in the woods); who gets your stuff; the music you’d like at your memorial; and more.

You can also specify how you want to be remembered digitally. Perhaps you want to allocate funds for annual site management fees, domain registration, or deputizing someone to ensure a Wiki-profile is factually accurate.

I spoke to Chen to find out more. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Suelin, how did you come up for the idea behind Cake?
With my background in healthcare and business, I saw not only the high costs involved in end-of-life care, but that in our country people often default to enduring more and more medical procedures without fully understanding the value, or the trade-offs. Three out of four people don’t plan for end-of-life, and I get why—the barriers to planning can be really high. Simply put, I saw an opportunity to help people plan better, to make their desires known, before it’s too late.

Because they’re too incapacitated to make their views known?
Right, it’s often brought up too late. Because, when surveyed, 80 percent of people would prefer to die at home—and yet, today, 80 percent of people die in medical facilities.

Planning for the final exit is a space ripe for disruption, then.
I knew there could be good digital tools for doing this but I couldn’t find any, so I found a great team and built Cake.

Is there also a generational shift? Due to social media, we get to ‘see’ people die, many of whom we might have lost touch with over the years. Death is going to happen to us all. But it feels more ‘visible’ now.
Absolutely. We have a lot of millennials on our platform, and we see that this generation is very pragmatic and perceives less stigma about death than older generations. Previous generations have been remembered through a gravestone or something similar. In time, those degrade. But our digital footprint, the traces of our lives, will persist online. I ask people, when your great-grandchildren search online for you in the future, what do you want them to find?

That’s a deeply unsettling and yet curiously interesting thought. You must have worked with many different partners to bring Cake to life.
Yes, we’ve spent hundreds of hours consulting with experts to develop all our online tools including: estate attorneys, funeral planners, physicians, social workers, and wealth managers.

How does Cake work? This is more than a basic will, right?
Yes, many of our users have done estate planning and have a will but realize that they still have gaps. We provide a personalized, comprehensive, and detailed checklist that helps people understand what planning they still need to do. It’s hard to know what legal fees are reasonable, because there’s a lack of transparency. Many of our users have seen an attorney but want more visibility into the process. It’s not just avoiding taxes on your assets after death (though of course this is very important). It’s also managing how you want to be remembered, your funeral or memorial service, your digital footprint, your digital assets (Bitcoin, etc.)—certainly doing more than putting all your passwords in an Excel doc and locking it (which has been recommended to several of our users).

How many data points is your AI gathering as it takes a Cake user through personal planning?
It’s fluid [and] really depends on the individual. Our Cake AI prompts you with questions, to capture data around many decisions that need to be made. But there’s also a freeform section for more personal wishes. Some of our users write (almost) novel-length answers to those.

What are some of the more ‘out there’ requests?
Well, every employee at Cake has gone through the process and one of my team members loves the idea of having a tree planted for him. A lot of our users, including me, feel they’d rather have a celebration of life than a somber funeral. One of our users wants to be buried with a 6-pack of Bud Lite. Someone else I know has left instructions to rent out a movie theater for his. Your last wishes should be a true expression of who you are.

How many people have signed up so far?
We don’t reveal exact user numbers.

Fair enough. It’s free to users, so what’s your revenue model?
We make money from affiliate links and from enterprise partners who distribute to their population. For example, we’ve built a Cake back-end for a large healthcare provider, an insurer, a bank, and other institutions. A premium product is also in the works.

You don’t share data with ‘interested parties’ who might want to sell fancy urns then?
No, trust is the most important thing to us. We will never sell or share personally identifiable information with any third party without our users consent.

Why the name Cake?
It’s a warm, inviting symbol of celebrating and honoring life. Planning is a positive act, a true gift to your loved ones.

You’ve build a web-based service, rather than a mobile app. Why?
It’s much faster to iterate and improve the platform, and doesn’t require any download. We also know that many of our user base is more comfortable with web apps than downloading native applications.

Do you have a tech team in-house or are you partnering with a digital agency on this build?
All in house! We actually have more female than male techies, who span several generations, which I’m very proud of.

Are you wedded to any particular tech tools?
Choosing Microsoft Azure as our hosting platform made it easy for us to implement excellent security and scalability for our product early on, and our code base heavily utilizes the Microsoft .NET stack as well. We recently also switched our internal IT to Office 365 and were early adopters of Microsoft Teams; so I guess we’re fans of Microsoft technologies.

Why are you based in Boston rather than any of the other Silicon cities?
I love Boston. There’s a lot of activity in FinTech, MedTech, and healthcare here. It’s a great place to be, with plenty of talent and financial support from big institutions.

Talking of support, who are your backers?
We raised pre-seed from Pillar VC, LaunchCapital, Arkitekt Ventures, and Honeycomb.

Finally, what’s next for you?
We have an exciting growth plan for 2019, and a number of new partners in the financial sector that will provide new avenues for growth and new opportunities to add features that enable our users to plan and have peace of mind. Cake is in the FinTech cohort of Mass Challenge 2019, which kicks off orientation on Jan. 18. The initiative is aimed at startups which have an enterprise-ready solution, and helps them partner with large organizations. Cake will be working with MassMutual, Fidelity, and AARP Innovation Labs.

Complete Article HERE!

What People Actually Say Before They Die

Insights into the little-studied realm of last words

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Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.

Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of dying people. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.To assess people’s “mental condition just before death,” MacDonald mined last-word anthologies, the only linguistic corpus then available, dividing people into 10 occupational categories (statesmen, philosophers, poets, etc.) and coding their last words as sarcastic, jocose, contented, and so forth. MacDonald found that military men had the “relatively highest number of requests, directions, or admonitions,” while philosophers (who included mathematicians and educators) had the most “questions, answers, and exclamations.” The religious and royalty used the most words to express contentment or discontentment, while the artists and scientists used the fewest.

MacDonald’s work “seems to be the only attempt to evaluate last words by quantifying them, and the results are curious,” wrote the German scholar Karl Guthke in his book Last Words, on Western culture’s long fascination with them. Mainly, MacDonald’s work shows that we need better data about verbal and nonverbal abilities at the end of life. One point that Guthke makes repeatedly is that last words, as anthologized in multiple languages since the 17th century, are artifacts of an era’s concerns and fascinations about death, not “historical facts of documentary status.” They can tell us little about a dying person’s actual ability to communicate.

Some contemporary approaches move beyond the oratorical monologues of yore and focus on emotions and relationships. Books such as Final Gifts, published in 1992 by the hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, and Final Conversations, published in 2007 by Maureen Keeley, a Texas State University communications-studies scholar, and Julie Yingling, professor emerita at Humboldt State University, aim to sharpen the skills of the living for having important, meaningful conversations with dying people. Previous centuries’ focus on last words has ceded space to the contemporary focus on last conversations and even nonverbal interactions. “As the person gets weaker and sleepier, communication with others often becomes more subtle,” Callanan and Kelley write. “Even when people are too weak to speak, or have lost consciousness, they can hear; hearing is the last sense to fade.”

I spoke to Maureen Keeley shortly after the death of George H. W. Bush, whose last words (“I love you, too,” he reportedly told his son, George W. Bush) were widely reported in the media, but she said they should properly be seen in the context of a conversation (“I love you,” the son had said first) as well as all the prior conversations with family members leading up to that point.

At the end of life, Keeley says, the majority of interactions will be nonverbal as the body shuts down and the person lacks the physical strength, and often even the lung capacity, for long utterances. “People will whisper, and they’ll be brief, single words—that’s all they have energy for,” Keeley said. Medications limit communication. So does dry mouth and lack of dentures. She also noted that family members often take advantage of a patient’s comatose state to speak their piece, when the dying person cannot interrupt or object.

Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”

It’s still the interactions that fascinate me, partly because their subtle interpersonal textures are lost when they’re written down. A linguist friend of mine, sitting with his dying grandmother, spoke her name. Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and died. What that plain description omits is how he paused when he described the sequence to me, and how his eyes quivered.

But there are no descriptions of the basics of last words or last interactions in the scientific literature. The most linguistic detail exists about delirium, which involves a loss of consciousness, the inability to find words, restlessness, and a withdrawal from social interaction. Delirium strikes people of all ages after surgery and is also common at the end of life, a frequent sign of dehydration and over-sedation. Delirium is so frequent then, wrote the New Zealand psychiatrist Sandy McLeod, that “it may even be regarded as exceptional for patients to remain mentally clear throughout the final stages of malignant illness.” About half of people who recover from postoperative delirium recall the disorienting, fearful experience. In a Swedish study, one patient recalled that “I certainly was somewhat tired after the operation and everything … and I did not know where I was. I thought it became like misty, in some way … the outlines were sort of fuzzy.” How many people are in a similar state as they approach death? We can only guess.

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in dying people, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.

Lisa Smartt at her father, Mort Felix’s bedside

After her father died, Lisa Smartt was left with endless questions about what she had heard him say, and she approached graduate schools, proposing to study last words academically. After being rebuffed, she began interviewing family members and medical staff on her own. That led her to collaborate with Raymond Moody Jr., the Virginia-born psychiatrist best known for his work on “near-death experiences” in a 1975 best-selling book, Life After Life. He has long been interested in what he calls “peri-mortal nonsense” and helped Smartt with the work that became Words on the Threshold, based on her father’s utterances as well as ones she’d collected via a website she called the Final Words Project.

One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.

He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.

Smartt says she’s been most surprised by narratives in people’s speech that seem to unfold, piecemeal, over days. Early on, one man talked about a train stuck at a station, then days later referred to the repaired train, and then weeks later to how the train was moving northward.

“If you just walk through the room and you heard your loved one talk about ‘Oh, there’s a boxing champion standing by my bed,’ that just sounds like some kind of hallucination,” Smartt says. “But if you see over time that that person has been talking about the boxing champion and having him wearing that, or doing this, you think, Wow, there’s this narrative going on.” She imagines that tracking these story lines could be clinically useful, particularly as the stories moved toward resolution, which might reflect a person’s sense of the impending end.

In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general. (However, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s have difficulty understanding figurative language, and anthropologists who study dying in other cultures told me that journey metaphors aren’t prevalent everywhere.)

Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with dying people, and dying people themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people’s fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with dying people. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients.

End-of-life communication will only become more relevant as life lengthens and deaths happen more frequently in institutions. Most people in developed countries won’t die as quickly and abruptly as their ancestors did. Thanks to medical advances and preventive care, a majority of people will likely die from either some sort of cancer, some sort of organ disease (foremost being cardiovascular disease), or simply advanced age. Those deaths will often be long and slow, and will likely take place in hospitals, hospices, or nursing homes overseen by teams of medical experts. And people can participate in decisions about their care only while they are able to communicate. More knowledge about how language ends and how dying people communicate would give patients more agency for a longer period of time.

But studying language and interaction at the end of life remains a challenge, because of cultural taboos about death and ethical concerns about having scientists at a dying person’s bedside. Experts also pointed out to me that each death is unique, which presents a variability that science has difficulty grappling with.

And in the health-care realm, the priorities are defined by doctors. “I think that work that is more squarely focused on describing communication patterns and behaviors is much harder to get funded because agencies like NCI prioritize research that directly reduces suffering from cancer, such as interventions to improve palliative-care communication,” says Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, a program director in the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, who oversees funding on patient-doctor communication at the end of life.

Despite the faults of Smartt’s book (it doesn’t control for things such as medication, for one thing, and it’s colored by an interest in the afterlife), it takes a big step toward building a corpus of data and looking for patterns. This is the same first step that child-language studies took in its early days. That field didn’t take off until natural historians of the 19th century, most notably Charles Darwin, began writing down things their children said and did. (In 1877, Darwin published a biographical sketch about his son, William, noting his first word: mum.) Such “diary studies,” as they were called, eventually led to a more systematic approach, and early child-language research has itself moved away from solely studying first words.

“Famous last words” are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death—one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes. “The process of dying is still very profound, but it’s a very different kind of profoundness,” says Bob Parker, the chief compliance officer of the home health agency Intrepid USA. “Last words—it doesn’t happen like the movies. That’s not how patients die.” We are beginning to understand that final interactions, if they happen at all, will look and sound very different.

Complete Article HERE!

Morphine, And A Side Of Grief Counseling:

Nursing Students Learn How To Handle Death


Belmont University’s nursing program started hiring actors like Vickie James to help with their end-of-life simulations for students.

By

Nursing requires hands-on training. But research has found that university curriculum often goes light on one of life’s universal experiences — dying. So some colleges have gone to new lengths to make the training more meaningful.

There’s a sound near the end — the death rattle. People stop swallowing. The lungs fill up. There can be involuntary moaning.

“So you get all that noise. And that’s really distressing for family members,” Professor Sara Camp of Nashville’s Belmont University says.

Camp and other nursing instructors at Belmont wear headsets and watch video monitors in a dark closet. The sounds they make emerge from realistic robots lying in hospital beds on the other side of the wall. The instructors also control the stats for the robots’ breathing, pulse and blood pressure.

Other than administering morphine, there’s no exact prescription for students to follow. A review of nursing textbooks found many make no mention of this standard part of the job. And studies of professional nurses find that many feel unprepared.

Belmont adjunct nursing instructor Morgan Bryant mimics the “death rattle” in her headset, also controlling the pulse, breathing and blood pressure of the simulated patients in the lab.

“They’re really comfortable in their skills, like putting in IVs and giving medications,” Camps says. “In this one, they have to focus on communication, when there’s not that much to do. It challenges them.”

There are family dynamics to navigate, like explaining to grown children how their mother signed a do-not-resuscitate order. They have to balance caring for the dying patient and attending to the patient’s family.

In response to surveys showing anxiety about death among young nurses, Belmont started hiring actors to make these end-of-life interactions as realistic as possible.

“That old cancer … didn’t want it to come back,” says Vickie Bailey, who has embraced her role as a grieving daughter.

The student, senior Sara Lindsay, sits on the bedside and puts a hand on Bailey, warning that the end is near.

“Now would be a good time if you have prayers or anything you want to say,” she tells Bailey.

“I’ve been praying all morning,” Bailey responds, in character.

The monitors stop beeping. Everyone sits in silence.

Once the simulation ends, Lindsay marvels at how real the moment felt.

Half a dozen beds are going at the same time in this simulation lab. And all the students gather to debrief afterward. Senior Zacnite Vargas volunteers that she second-guessed herself.

“Should I say she’s dying? She’s dead? She’s passed?” she asks. “I don’t know how to be straight-forward with it.”

Camp tells the class to be cautious, especially about predicting when a patient will die, but also show compassion.

“They may not remember what you say, but they’ll remember how they feel when you were there, because you were there.”

It’s such important work, Camp says, that more students should get the chance to rehearse.

Complete Article HERE!

The Choices We Make for Others at the End of Life

A palliative care nurse explains what to expect in the last days and hours.

A dying person’s attention turns toward a place we do not see and that they cannot explain. They are done with the business of the living, as it were, and more or less finished with us.

Excerpted from Advice for Future Corpses by Sallie Tisdale.

In Advice for Future Corpses, author and palliative care nurse Sallie Tisdale shares insight and contemplation into what constitutes a good death. Managing our own avoidance and fear, she writes, is key to shepherding a peaceful final passage. Here she describes what to expect, and consider, during the last days and hours.

Death takes many forms. One death is anticipated over months. Another death is stunningly abrupt. And now and then death is held back by technology. I have seen how these deaths are different, and they are all the same, in the end: A person breathes and then breathes no more. He enters a stillness like no other. Breath. Another breath, and then no more. But when the breaths are made by a machine or the blood pressure is sustained by powerful drugs, someone has to make an awful decision.

Many aspects of medical and nursing care become unnecessary or intrusive for a dying person. Will the result of a lab test change the plan? If not, then don’t do it. Why take another vitamin? Are you really worried about the cholesterol level at this point? You don’t need to check blood pressure routinely. But sometimes a person is already hooked up—intravenous fluids and drugs to raise blood pressure and support for breathing—and the only way to stop the intrusion is to unhook. The advent of machines like defibrillators and ventilators created a new kind of crisis for the dying. (One report from the time referred to “this era of resuscitatory arrogance.”) A lecture in 1967 about how medicine should define death was called “The Right to Be Let Alone.”

Futility is a legal term in health care. A doctor, a team of people, even a hospital, can invoke futility and refuse to continue treatment that only prolongs suffering. This doesn’t happen immediately; it’s a drawn-out, painful process. The vocabulary makes everything worse. Doctors speak almost glibly about “withdrawing” or “withholding” treatment. The nurse says, “There’s nothing more to be done.” Which is a stupid thing to say, because there are all kinds of things to be done; they just don’t involve trying to keep someone alive. Such comments create a terrible sense of culpability in a heartbroken spouse or child. But what is really being done is good care.

Journalist and author Virginia Morris pleads for a change of terms: “When we take a terminally ill patient off life support, we are not ‘pulling the plug,’ we are ‘freeing’ the patient to die. We are ‘releasing’ her from excessive technology and invasive treatments. When we allow death to happen, we are not killing people, we are caring for them. We are loving them.”

We want to put it off as long as possible. Even if we are sure that Mom or Dad wouldn’t want to be kept alive “on a machine,” in the moment of crisis when everyone is yelling at us to decide, we’re not prepared. We literally have no experience making such a decision; we may do it only once in our lives. 

The hardest part is the loss, but a close second is the need to shove your own fears and desires to the side. Surgeon and bioethicist Sherwin Nuland said that at the time when decisions about life support and life-prolonging treatments are being made, “everybody becomes enormously selfish.” He emphatically includes doctors and nurses in with the family. We may not recognize that selfishness is driving the words we choose or the kind of advice that’s given. Doctors may not have any idea they are doing this. When they offer yet another experimental drug, they may genuinely believe they know what’s best for the patient. But best: Best is subjective. Best is your point of view. Best is what you want.

Being able to make a decision like this for another requires an understanding of each other, and time for self-reflection. You have to consider the painful, scary, and unwanted fact of separation. You are the proxy for the person in the bed. What she wants is all that counts. You want the person to live. Or you want the person to die your version of a “good” death. Or you want him to live another week until the rest of the family arrives. You want the gasping holler of pain in your chest to go away. Can you choose a course of treatment that will allow the person you love most in the world to die? Can you say no on their behalf to something you would choose for yourself? Can you say yes on their behalf to an end you would never want? Can you set your own beliefs to the side? This inevitable conflict of interest—you are dying and I want you to live—is why a spouse or close family member often should not be the one making all the decisions. You have to ignore the begging chorus in your head, because it’s not about what you want.

In an old Japanese tradition, a person writes a poem on New Year’s Eve that will be read at their funeral if they die in the coming year. A modern addition to this practice includes having a professional funeral photograph taken and picking out the clothing you want to wear, in styles specially made for corpses. The Japanese word jōjū means ever-present or unchanging. I like the translation “everlasting.” The image of jōjū is often the moon. How can the moon, which is never the same from night to night, be everlasting? And yet it is always the same moon. Jōjū is that quality of unstoppable change and the eternal at once. Death comes even while we are alive.

In the early 1700s, Mizuta Masahide, an admirer of the great poet Bashō and a doctor by profession, had a fire at his home. It burned down his storehouse, leaving his family impoverished. His poem that year:

My storehouse burned down.

Now nothing stands between me

And the moon above.

Everlasting.

A dying person’s attention turns toward a place we do not see and that they cannot explain. They are done with the business of the living, as it were, and more or less finished with us. Now they are not a mother or a plumber or a friend. Now they are entirely a dying person, and the world begins to shine. In spite of going hours without speaking, in spite of needing help to button a shirt, he is busy. He may not have the energy to talk, because he is waiting for something and that takes everything he has left.

He may be waiting to understand why.

Laugh. Laugh! Sing. The last kiss, the last dream, the last joke to tell. I have been telling you all the many things we might say, and shouldn’t. Things to say as the end is coming: I love you. I hope the best for you. We will be all right. Go with peace.

Then we are listening again. We are returning to stillness, and to hearing what is being said without words. Most of us are not used to silence. It takes getting used to. The background noise of our lives is near-constant: endless voices, television, music, traffic, the ping from incoming texts, the demanding requests of daily life. Because we aren’t used to silence, we don’t understand how to be in it, how full it is. We may struggle against it, but silence is part of this world now. Silence is attention. Attention on this, right here, right now. Attention on the hand against the sheet, the texture of the cotton, the cool cotton. The hand rising to take a cup; the hard, warm curve of the cup. The steam. The heat. The sensation of the bending tendon in the hand, the scratch of a nail along the bedcover. Inhalation. Exhalation. All this in silence, filled with the music between words, what you might call the music of the spheres—the world’s hum. The faint vibration of breath and muscle and time.

The writer Dennis Potter died of pancreatic cancer. A few months before his death, he gave a remarkable interview on the BBC. His wife was also dying, of breast cancer, and he was her main caregiver. He was relaxed and smiling—his pain cocktail was a combination of morphine, champagne, and cigarettes—and full of his signature dark humor. Dying, he said, gave him a new perspective on life; it gave him a way to celebrate.

“The blossom is out in full now,” he said, describing what he saw from his office window. “It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nice blossom’last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.” He couldn’t really explain, he added; you have to experience it. “The glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people, bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”

He died nine days after his wife.

Let’s talk about death

A growing number of medical schools are incorporating palliative care and end-of-life discussions into the curriculum. The result? Less suffering for patients and physicians.

by Amy Paturel, MPH

During her first rotation in internal medicine, Dawn Gross, MD, PhD, assessed a bone marrow transplant patient along with a group of fellow residents and her attending physician. When they left the young patient’s room, the attending said, “He’s going to die.” Two days later the patient was dead. 

“I remember thinking, ‘What did he see that I didn’t see?’” says Gross, who is now an associate professor in the department of palliative medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Over time, she learned the science of illness and death and how to tell when a patient is dying. But what stuck with her was the fact that the patient had no idea he was going to die. 

Traditionally, a doctor’s primary job was to keep you alive, not discuss how you want to die — or even if you are going to. Now, the paradigm is shifting. Instead of employing extreme measures, doctors are increasingly learning how to stop interrupting death — and to talk about what that looks like. 

“Patients need to know what is happening to them, so they can plan,” says Tamara Vesel, MD, chief of palliative care and professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “And doctors need to see illness and death as an opportunity for societal and personal growth instead of a societal and personal failure.” 

Unfortunately, data suggest most doctors feel ill-equipped to tackle end-of-life conversations. A 2014 study published in Palliative Supportive Care reported that more than half of respondents deferred conversations about advance directives to emergency room physicians. And in 2016, 88% of residents reported little to no training on end-of-life care during residency. But that is starting to change. 

“Doctors need to see illness and death as an opportunity for societal and personal growth instead of a societal and personal failure.”
Tamara Vesel, MD
Tufts University School of Medicine

Increasingly, medical school leaders are implementing end-of-life training that includes real-life practical skills. At the same time, more physicians are beginning to view end-of-life conversations as a medical tool that’s as important as any drug or device. The result: “Don’t die on my watch” is being turned upside down. 

A paradigm shift 

With advances in medicine and technology, Americans are living longer, often with ongoing or repeated hospitalizations. More than one quarter of all Medicare expenditures occur during a patient’s last year of life. But life-extending treatments have trade-offs. 

If faced with a serious illness, most people say they would prefer a natural death rather than exhausting all medical options, according to survey data. And more than two-thirds of people say they want to die at home, while less than a third actually do. Medical schools are uniquely positioned to help bridge the gap between what patients want at the end of life and what they’re actually getting.

“Just because we have the technology to prolong life doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to use it,” says Vesel. “The problem is, we’re so afraid of paternalism in medicine that we don’t use our medical knowledge and experience to sufficiently guide patients.” 

Instead, many doctors focus on presenting a smorgasbord of medical choices — “then we let the patient choose so we feel like we’re off the hook,” says Daniela Lamas, MD, a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard faculty member, and author of You Can Stop Humming Now.

Yet, according to Scott Halpern, MD, PhD, MBE, professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the single most important determinant of the choices patients make is how doctors communicate. In a series of studies, Halpern and his colleagues discovered that seriously ill patients are more likely to select comfort-oriented care at the end of their lives if that was the default option they were randomly assigned. Similarly, when chest compressions, breathing machines, and feeding tubes were the default choices, they were more likely to select those invasive measures, too.

The goal for physicians then is to know their patients well enough to shepherd them toward the treatment path that best matches their values. “It is scary to ‘nudge’ a patient toward an end-of-life decision, but maybe that’s what it means to be a doctor — leading patients toward the decisions that are most consistent with their wishes,” says Lamas. 

That’s one reason insurers are paying doctors to have real conversations around end-of-life planning. The goal: to limit suffering for the patient and his or her loved ones — but also to provide a meaningful way for physicians to help guide patients through the natural process of dying.

A new wave of training

Currently, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the organization that accredits medical schools, does not require clinical rotations or courses on palliative medicine or end-of-life care. Part of the issue is that these skills “can’t be taught through lectures and demonstrations,” says Susan Block, MD, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Harvard Medical School. “The only way to improve competencies is through field practice and feedback.” 

To that end, a growing number of medical educators are creating rotations within hospices, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities to give students and residents an opportunity to practice these skills. Institutions, including Tufts University School of Medicine, the Robert Larner, M.D., College of Medicine at The University of Vermont, University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and others are weaving palliative care training into everything students do. “That’s a huge culture shift,” says Gross. 

To determine how best to train students to do this important work, Tufts University School of Medicine Dean Harris Berman has been meeting with the academic deans of four Massachusetts medical schools every six months since early 2017. The deans agreed upon a set of minimal competencies every medical student should have prior to graduation, and continue to work on next steps to meet and test these competencies.

As part of this effort, Tufts University School of Medicine plans to introduce a new curriculum in the fall of 2019. “Rather than a single class, a ‘Patient Experience’ thread — encompassing end-of-life and palliative care, advanced communication, and impact of health on patients and their families — will follow students through all four years of medical school,” says Vesel. 

The Larner College of Medicine, too, is equipping physicians-in-training to have these conversations. In addition to integrating palliative care and end-of-life training into all four years of medical school, third year students participate in a “bridge week” focused solely on hospice and palliative medicine. The 35-hour curriculum covers practical skills, symptom management, communication tools (with hands-on simulated training), and resilience, explains Stephen Berns, MD, director of education for palliative medicine and assistant professor of family.

Using tools developed by a nonprofit training organization called VitalTalk and Atul Gawande’s Ariadne Labs’ Serious Illness Care Program, Larner COM students learn how to share information, respond empathically, and drill down patients’ values. “It’s really about helping medical students and residents use their medical expertise to identify a treatment plan that matches patients’ goals,” says Berns. 

At the Perelman School of Medicine, Halpern lectures fourth year medical students about how patients, caregivers, and clinicians make end-of-life decisions. Their program also requires pulmonary and critical care fellows to participate in end-of-life communication training before beginning their fellowship. “Each fellow has to have a number of supervised conversations with real patients and family members,” says Halpern. “They’re also required to watch and listen to attendings engage in similar conversations.” 

Surveys consistently show that care providers who do this well can make a significant difference for patients. Research indicates that palliative medicine can reduce anxiety and pain, relieve symptoms, and improve quality of life and mood. It can also reduce spending, according to a recent meta-analysis of inpatient specialty palliative care.

Coming full circle

At the dawn of medicine, physicians were with their patients throughout the life cycle — and certainly at their death. Doctors viewed being at the patient’s deathbed as an honor, a privilege. Medicine is slowly returning to those values.

“We’re all taught a structure for taking medical notes. The first stop: chief complaint, abbreviated as ‘CC.’ My dream is that instead of the chief complaint, it’s ‘CW,’ or chief wish. What does the patient wish for? When we start to ask what’s getting in the way of doing that, it changes how we care for people.”
Dawn Gross, MD, PhD
University of California, San Francisco

Research consistently shows that doctors who are comfortable with end-of-life issues provide better care to dying patients than those who aren’t. “More and more clinicians are recognizing their professional and moral responsibilities extend beyond preserving life and include helping people whose life is coming to an end have their last days weeks and months be as comfortable and fulfilling and meaningful as possible,” says Halpern. 

Adds Gross, “We’re all taught a structure for taking medical notes. The first stop: chief complaint, abbreviated as ‘CC.’ My dream is that instead of the chief complaint, it’s ‘CW,’ or chief wish. What does the patient wish for? When we start to ask what’s getting in the way of doing that, it changes how we care for people.”

Complete Article HERE!