How visions, dreams and end-of-life experiences help people prepare for death

By Erin Blakemore

Mary was dying. As her children gathered at her bedside, she began to cradle a nonexistent baby. She cooed and cuddled it in her arms, showing a happiness that was at odds with her physical suffering. Her children turned to the doctor, concerned that their mother was hallucinating. But he encouraged them to let her act out a scene that only made sense to her.

Later, they learned that Mary had delivered a stillborn baby years before she had her other children. What had seemed like a bizarre hallucination actually seemed to help address a trauma she had held inside for years. She died peacefully soon after.

Christopher Kerr, the hospice doctor who witnessed Mary’s actions, credits her with helping change his view on death.

It turns out that similar visions, dreams and end-of-life experiences are common parts of the dying process. Kerr describes what those visions are like and how they help people prepare for the end in “Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End,” written with Carine Mardorossian.

Kerr has interviewed thousands of dying patients about their visions and dreams, which often include dead family members or pets or which recreate past scenes from which patients extract meaning or healing. Patients describe seeing dead family members in the room, feeling a comforting presence nearby, or tying up unfinished emotional business relating to past slights and traumas.

The book is a challenge to doctors, whom Kerr encourages to honor and listen to the dying.

“We need to bring doctors back to the bedside, to their roots as comforters of the dying rather than as mere technicians trying to extend life at all costs,” he writes.

But it beckons to readers, too, encouraging them to open up to how dying patients make meaning of their own lives. By listening to patients, says Kerr, “dying becomes less about death than about life’s resilience.”

Complete Article HERE!

A Chaplain on How to Talk About the Right to Die and Death With Patients

By Diane Rehm

Martha Kay Nelson has had a long career in hospice work. Rather than choosing hospice work, she believes hospice work chose her. Her training was at Harvard Divinity School. She did a yearlong internship as a hospice chaplain during her graduate work. The year after she graduated, she managed to combine her career as a chaplain with her work in hospice. She is in her mid-forties, with short hair and hazel eyes. Her warm, open face, earnest manner, and easy smile help me understand why she is so good at her work. We sit together in her office at Mission Hospice & Home Care in San Mateo, California.

DIANE: How do you feel about California’s “right to die” law?

MARTHA: Well, I have many feelings, and they could vary depending on the day or the hour. It depends on whom I’m talking to, and what her or his experience is. My overall sense about the law is that people have a right to make their own health-care decisions, whether it’s at the end of life or at any time up to that point. I know people have a hard time having these conversations, particularly early on, before they’re even sick. And then they get sick and it’s crisis time, and those decisions have to be made quickly. The End of Life Option Act to me is part of a spectrum of all those decisions and conversations that come at the end. It’s a new end point on that spectrum.

D: You’ve been in a leadership position here at Mission Hospice, not only learning, but teaching. Tell me what have been the elements of transmitting this information to others.

M: It’s been an interesting learning curve. I think even seasoned hospice professionals have had to adjust to a new option for patients, stepping into that terrain. The elements that have been important in teaching staff members, working with health-care partners, have been to get folks to acknowledge at the outset that this is a challenging topic, this is new terrain, there are profound implications, and not to shy away from it.

Some folks here at Mission Hospice didn’t want to participate, but the majority did, to have their questions answered or share some of their thoughts, their concerns. We’ve done this regularly enough that people felt they could talk freely about the End of Life Option Act. We didn’t want it to be whispered about awkwardly in the corner, that this law is coming and our patients are going to have the right to choose the option. As an agency, we’re not advocates for the law, we’re advocates for our patients, and we won’t abandon them. Having said that, any of our employees, if they’re not comfortable, don’t have to participate. They can opt out if they need to, and they would be fully supported.

D: What kinds of questions did you get from staff? What kinds of issues did they raise?

M: At the outset, a lot of general questions about details of the law, how it works, how are we supposed to communicate with our colleagues around it, what can we say to the patient and what can’t we, those kinds of things. Questions arose about accessibility to the law. If I have patients who are saying they just want to end it all, and they’re saying this a lot, but they’re not specifically asking about the law, then can I bring it up with them or not? We have a policy here at Mission Hospice that we let the patient lead. If a patient is inquiring about his or her options, then we will be there.

That’s one kind of question. Other clinicians have asked about folks who haven’t had the chance to be educated about medical aid in dying, or don’t have access to resources where they might have learned about it. What if it’s something they’d like to avail themselves of ? There’s kind of a social justice question there. There are also questions arising from specific cases. Every case is different.

D: Can you give me an idea of how many patients have actually come forward and asked you about the right to die?

M: We’ve been tracking some of these numbers, and to date, we’ve served around forty-five people since California’s law went into effect, which was a lot more than we anticipated. When back in 2016 we set out to draft our policy and prepare ourselves, we thought maybe we’d have four or five people in the first year. We had twenty-one. And about that same number inquired about the law, but never went all the way through the process. Either they actually died before they had a chance to use the law, or they changed their minds. I would imagine that it was split evenly.

D: Tell me about the process. So a patient comes to you and asks about the process, the law. How do you respond?

M: My initial response as a chaplain would be one of curiosity. I’d be interested in learning more about their thoughts and why they’re asking. It’s a big thing to ask about. Sometimes people are afraid to even inquire. They’re afraid of being shamed or judged. So I’d want to let that person know that I’m glad they’re asking. And then we’d have a conversation, whatever they would wish to say at that time. Next, I would contact the doctor and the rest of my interdisciplinary team members and would let them know the topic had been broached. Then a doctor would probably go and make a direct visit, which would be considered the first formal request, if the decision was made to pursue that course.

We really encourage the other team members to make sure they keep talking to one another—the social worker, the nurse, the spiritual counselor, home health aides, and volunteers who might also be involved. Through a team effort, we would need to have clarity on how much privacy the patient would want. Patients have the right under the law to not tell anyone but the doctors they’re working with, not even family members. Our experience has been that that’s not often the case. Usually there is communication with family.

D: Who makes the initial judgment that the patient has six months or less to live?

M: The attending physician on the case. And if the patient inquires about the law, and his or her doctor says, “I’m not comfortable being involved with this,” that’s one way we might get involved. Or it might be a hospice patient already on our service.

D: I saw in your waiting room a brochure for Death Cafes. Can you tell me about them?

M: The Death Cafe movement started several years ago in England. It’s basically having a conversation over coffee and cakes in a public venue. Anyone is welcome to attend, and the purpose is open-ended. The goal is to talk about death in any way you wish. There does need to be a facilitator, someone who is able to establish ground rules in etiquette so folks aren’t talking over one another. Folks that host them tend to have some level of experience in end-of- life care, in thanatology, but anyone can sign up. I’ve led a couple of them.

D: How successful do you think Death Cafes are as teaching tools, as comforting elements in the whole discussion of death?

M: I think Death Cafes are successful in meeting the needs of folks who already want to talk about death. If you show up at a Death Cafe, there’s something in you that is already ready to speak and to hear what other people are thinking. It can serve as a cross-pollination of ideas and thoughts, and normalization. The cafes meet a kind of thirst that we have in our culture to speak about these things openly and not be afraid. How you get people to Death Cafes is another question. I’ve had some people say they’re offended by that name, or they don’t want to attend a Death Cafe because it sounds morbid.

D: What is the best way to reach people? How do we get the conversation started even before we’re sick?

M: There’s no one best way. It’s about being creative and really getting to know your community. In my family, I’ve been lucky in that we’ve always talked about death openly. I have ongoing conversations now with my father. He’s about to turn eighty-three, and I really value the kinds of discussions and ruminations we have.

It’s wonderful. We’ve started kind of reflecting theologically, talking about, wondering together, what happens after we die. To be able to have that in a father-daughter kind of way. I’m well aware of what a precious opportunity it is to hear his thoughts. As he comes into the “lean and slippered pantaloon” time of his life, as he might say—some of his last chapters— I feel really blessed that he’s willing to discuss it openly.

D: How do you open that discussion for the general public?

M: I think it takes courage and a conscious decision to ask a question of someone in a moment when you feel there’s an opportunity. Someone speaking about her or his health, some decline, or illness, grief, and you ask, “How would you like things to be?” And perhaps even being a bit persistent if you get an initial brush-off, which often happens, but trying again, and saying, “ Really, I would like to know.”

I also think reaching children is important. I think that in our death-denying culture, children are really shielded from all things involved with death. Things happen at the funeral parlor, no longer at home, and we try to protect children in all kinds of ways. But if you don’t allow children who want to be involved in a loved one’s illness or death, I think you’re doing them a disservice. You’re keeping them from something that is integral to life for all of us. The earlier you can start to have those experiences and wonder about them and ask the questions, the more skills you will have as you age to meet them openly.

D: Have you decided what you want for yourself at the end?

M: I have no idea. I do know that I would like to have the right and the option to choose. I understand that even just knowing that the option is available can bring a lot of comfort to people. I haven’t faced a terminal illness that might cause me great physical pain or suffering, or mental or spiritual suffering. There’s one area that gives me pause, which is when folks choose medical aid in dying because they’re used to being in control in their lives. They might not have physical or mental or spiritual suffering, but they want to have personal agency. I think they entirely have the right to do that. But I also believe we’re in a culture that distorts the degree to which we think we’re in control. So on a soul level, on a much deeper level, I wonder, Are we messing with something there? How is it that we’re making such a profound decision from a place of a distorted need for control? And then I think, Well, what do I know about their journey and what they need? Maybe this is the one time they’ve ever made a strong, solid decision for themselves, and who am I to say what it is they need to learn?

D: But isn’t pain, intractable pain and suffering, and the inability to care for oneself, a sufficient reason to respect someone’s decision in terms of his or her final say?

M: Absolutely. I think clinicians have more trouble when they can’t observe visible intractable pain, when they can’t see physical or emotional suffering. It’s harder for clinicians to get their heads and hearts around that. Why is someone making this choice? And so I do a lot of counseling with staff about that, exploring how to meet the needs of the person when we don’t see them suffering, at least not on the surface. And we have to remind ourselves, clinicians need to express those feelings and concerns, so that when they’re dealing with patients directly, they can be respectful and meet them on their own terms.

Complete Article HERE!

The Pitfalls Of Extending Life And Prolonging Death

Humans have had to face death and mortality since since the beginning of time, but our experience of the dying process has changed dramatically in recent history.

Haider Warraich, a fellow in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that death used to be sudden, unexpected and relatively swift — the result of a violent cause, or perhaps an infection. But, he says, modern medicines and medical technologies have lead to a “dramatic extension” of life — and a more prolonged dying processes.

“We’ve now … introduced a phase of our life, which can be considered as ‘dying,’ in which patients have terminal diseases in which they are in and out of the hospital, they are dependent in nursing homes,” Warraich says. “That is something that is a very, very recent development in our history as a species.”

Prolonging life might sound like a good thing, but Warraich notes that medical technologies often force patients, their loved ones and their doctors to make difficult, painful decisions. In his new book, Modern Death, he writes about a patient with end-stage dementia who screamed “kill me” as a feeding tube was inserted into his nose.

“This is probably one of the encounters that I had in residency that I have been unable to shake from my memory,” Warraich says. “I think if you ask any physician, any nurse, any paramedic, they’ll have many such stories to tell you.”

Interview Highlights

On the importance of having a healthcare proxy, living will and advanced directive

One of the biggest problems that we face in not only modern society, but in societies of olden times as well, is that people have always been very afraid to talk about death. In many cultures it is considered bad luck to talk about death and it is thought to be a bad omen. I think to some extent that extends to this very day. But … I think having a living will, having an advanced directive, or perhaps most importantly, having a designated healthcare proxy, someone who can help transmit your decisions to the team when you’re not able to do so, is perhaps the most important thing that we can do for ourselves as patients and as human beings.

On giving CPR and knowing when to stop giving CPR

One of the things about CPR, Terry, is that almost everyone in medicine knows how to start CPR, when to start CPR, really what to do in CPR under even complex situations, but the one thing that almost no one really teaches us, and there are no guidelines for, is when to stop CPR. I think in some ways that is one of the biggest challenges that we in medicine face all the time. …

I was actually working in the hospital last night and it was about 3 in the morning and I was called by one of my other colleagues who was another cardiology fellow, he asked me, “Haider, I need your help. I have a patient that we are doing CPR on,” and he wanted some help from me. So I walked over to the intensive care unit, and the patient was in her 60s. … There was an entire team in the room doing chest compressions on this woman, and they had been doing it for an hour and a half at that point, much, much, much longer than most CPRs last. …

At the same time while this CPR was ongoing, the patient’s family member, her daughter, was outside the room, and she was crying. … Even though we could give her all the information … that wasn’t perhaps what she was looking for, because what we were asking her to think about or to do was one of the hardest things anyone has to ever bear, which was, “Do you want us to stop CPR?” And that’s the type of thing that I don’t think any of us can ever prepare for, especially when it’s our parent that’s involved.

On why he wrote a book about dying

I really wanted to find answers to some very, very basic questions, like what are the implications of the sort of life extension that we have achieved? What is the role of religion, not only a patient’s religion but a physician’s religion when it comes to dealing with the end of life? How is social media affecting how people experience the end of life? …

So many times I’ve found myself in the room where there are people who were so much more experienced in life than I was, yet knew so little about death and dying. And so I wanted to write a book so that people could go into those really, really difficult places and feel like they’re armed with information, that this isn’t a completely foreign territory for them and that in some way could help them navigate and deal with the sort of difficult situations that lay ahead for them.

On the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act

It is very unfortunate that health is so politicized in this country, because it doesn’t have to be. Health and wellness aren’t red or blue, and they shouldn’t be, but unfortunately that is where we are. I hope that when policies are being enacted in DC, patient’s voices, those who have benefited from the ACA, those who have gained insurance, those voices are not lost in the midst of all of this political activity.

On immigrating to the U.S. from Pakistan

Dr. Haider Warraich has written medical and opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

I came to the United States in 2010 and [until now] have only lived in an America in which Barack Obama was the president. I think in some ways Trump’s victory has really shaken me, because of how invested I was in the idea that America is a special place, it’s a truly multicultural society. And I’m still trying to understand, I think like so many others, just exactly what happened. Especially as a writer and as a physician I’ve tried to separate myself from my identity as a Muslim. I’d rather be known as a physician/scientist/writer who happens to be Pakistani, rather than a young Pakistani Muslim immigrant who happens to be a doctor and a writer, but I don’t know. Given how things are changing, I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to set that narrative for myself. That’s a scary thought — to live an identity that is so politicized even when you wish for it to not be.

Between life and death:

What a neurologist learned when his brother-in-law fell into a coma

In neurology, there’s a “middle ground” between life and death that providers and patients’ family members alike struggle to navigate—but a new subspecialty could help improve communication around patients’ care, Joseph Stern, a neurologist who’s found himself on both the provider and family side of these difficult brain injuries, writes for the New York Times‘ “Well.”

A family member’s aneurysm leads to difficult decisions

Two years ago, Stern’s brother-in-law, Pat, collapsed with a brain hemorrhage from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm and was taken to UCLA Medical Center. Stern, as Pat’s legally designated health care power of attorney, gave permission for Pat to undergo a “surgical clipping of his ruptured aneurysm” and flew to California to oversee the rest of Pat’s care and communicate those care decisions with Pat’s family.

“Technically, surgery went well,” Stern writes. “But Pat never regained consciousness.” While Pat wasn’t brain-dead, “he remained deeply comatose,” Stern writes.

This, Stern writes, left Pat in a complicated, but all too common, “middle ground” in medicine: he’d experienced a “neurologically devastating injury without brain death.”

In these cases, Stern writes, care-related “decisions can be more difficult” for both family members and providers to know when to stop life-sustaining care. While brain death “is stark and final,” Stern writes that patients with severe neurological injuries who are not brain dead can survive on life-sustaining supports though in many cases they may never wake again.

Stern and Pat’s neurosurgeon, Gregory Lekovic, decided to give Pat a week to improve, and if he didn’t, Lekovic advised the family not pursue more aggressive measures, such as a tracheostomy and G-tube placement. “Lekovic and I worried it would be difficult to back off after those procedures had occurred,” Stern writes.

Pat didn’t neurologically improve after a week, and it was likely that he “would never regain consciousness,” Stern writes.

Stern and Pat’s family had decided to stop treatment, but on the morning they planned to do so one of the neuro-ICU specialists gave them reason to pause. “[O]ne of the neuro-ICU specialists presented a scenario in which Pat might wake up, become able to walk with assistance, and participate with his family,” Stern writes. However, “When pressed, the doctor admitted he was giving us the best possible outcome, rather than the most likely outcome,” Stern writes.

Stern and the family consulted again with Pat’s neurosurgeon, Lekovic, who said if it were his loved one, he’d “make the decision to end treatment,” Stern writes. According to Stern, Lekovic “seemed genuinely sad” saying this.

The importance of empathy and connection

“Doctors often think it is most important to be precise and not make mistakes; to predict the future with medical certainty,” Stern writes. “In my experience, connection and empathy are far more important than certainty. Patients and families want to know that you care about them and that you appreciate their pain in difficult circumstances.”

To help guide families and caregivers through this complicated medical condition, Stern notes that a new field, called neuropalliative care, has emerged. In neuropalliative care, providers “focus ‘on outcomes important to patients and families’ … ‘to guide and support patients and families through complex choices involving immense uncertainty and intensely important outcomes of mind and body.'”

Health care providers shouldn’t “focus on the short-term or allow care to be driven by procedures, losing sight of outcome and quality of life,” Stern writes. “We need to approach our patients and their families with open hearts, acknowledging their suffering and the uncertainty we all experience.”

In the case of Pat, Stern explains that his family, particularly Pat’s sons, “appreciated the truth when I explained their father’s prognosis.” Of course, the sons were “devastated at the prospect of losing him,” Stern writes, but “honesty and inclusion in decision-making were important in helping them move forward with their lives”

Complete Article HERE!

Do doctors grieve differently?

After Dr Alison Edwards’ soulmate died, grief took hold. Who else, she wondered, knew what this was like?

Dr Alison Edwards set up the website, Doc Grief, following the death of her partner Mick 15 years ago.

By Doug Hendrie

‘We really need to talk more about death … it is an inevitable part of life, and yet we shroud it in euphemism, hushed secrecy, and denial. We often grieve alone with little sense of shared understanding as we sanitise our emotions and somehow carry on.’

That is how South Australian GP Dr Alison Edwards began a talk she gave to her local palliative care team. And it is why she set up a website, Doc Grief, dedicated to supporting doctors who have lost loved ones.

That is what she wished existed when she lost her ‘soulmate’ Mick to a sudden cardiac arrest 15 years ago.

Dr Edwards’ own path of grief has shown her that doctors often grieve differently – and that the professional distance necessary to deal with death at work simply does not cope with personal grief.

‘I felt the need to know others had walked a similar path and survived, and to maybe find some tips about how best to achieve this,’ she told newsGP.

‘I wanted to read a story that was a close match to mine, but found very little in print about doctors grieving. So some years later I felt drawn to create such a site for others.’

Writing on her site, Dr Edwards tells the story of her loss:

Mick was the local footy legend, the cheeky butcher with a sparkle in his eyes. After 38 years of thinking life for me was destined not to be one of a long-term couple, it was really nice to have someone to love and be loved by and even see myself growing old with.

Mick had spent the afternoon out with the kids and had had a couple of beers down the pub while I was in at work. He was in one of his favourite positions – lying on the lounge channel-surfing. And then Mick had a cardiac arrest and died. No warning. No clues. Just chatting with me one minute about the perfume the kids had given me for Christmas and next minute making funny breathing noises as if he didn’t like the perfume.

Mick died, and the world as I knew it crashed down around me.

Mick was just 37.

In the immediate aftermath, Dr Edwards’ small community – Port Broughton on SA’s Yorke Peninsula – reached out. That, she found, was supportive and challenging.

‘It meant having to share my grief with the town. There was no opportunity to return to work and not have everyone wanting to express condolences,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t turn around without finding more scones, lasagnes and soup.

‘People want to do something physical, which is beautiful, but you also can’t be anonymous. In an urban practice, you could sneak back and your patients would necessarily know. Here, everyone knew.’

Dr Edwards took several months off following Mick’s death. When she returned to work, she printed little cards for her patients to read ahead of consultations.

The cards stated that Dr Edwards was doing okay and asked patients to treat it as a normal professional consultation.

‘No one could stick to it. I gave up,’ she explained. ‘Patients felt rude not to express their condolences.

‘The first time you see everyone, they feel the need to go through it. It made things a little bit harder.’

Since she set up the site, many GPs have told Dr Edwards that it has been helpful. Some have written to her seeking support. Others have contributed their own stories of grieving.

‘Reaching out to those with lived experience can be very supportive,’ she said.

‘I’ve had people write saying thank you so much for setting this up. Just knowing that someone else had lived the experience while having a broader understanding of the health system [is helpful].

‘Doctors do get the idea that random stuff happens. In the community, there’s often the expectation that we can fix everything, but doctors understand that things are unpredictable.

‘People do randomly have cardiac arrests and die.’

Dr Edwards believes doctors grieve differently, due to their familiarity with death and learned ability to maintain professional distance.

‘Knowing death so intimately may falsely lead us to think we are acquainted with grief, but when it comes to losing a loved one all bets are off,’ she wrote in a KevinMD article.

Dr Edwards believes that the stereotypical doctor personality traits – high achievers able to hide their emotions and focused on control – can pose particular challenges, as grief and loss are entirely uncontrollable.

‘Doctors spend most of their time observing … [but] unless we have loved in a dispassionate, dissociated way, we do not give our grief a fair chance if we do not live it,’ she wrote.

Dr Edwards’ grief was ‘very raw’ for the first few years. Over time, it gradually changed.

‘I went from feeling it with every breath and as if it was sitting right in front of me, to a place of living with it rather than living for it,’ she told newsGP.

But she still misses the shared life that could have been, writing:

I still love him and what he gave me. And I miss the future we didn’t get to share … I think I have a more profound sense of living life to my fullest capacity and valuing what I do have.

I have coped by taking one day at a time, allowing time to soften the impact and create new memories.’

There are no shortcuts and no way of bypassing the process of healing after a broken heart.

There are no right ways of grieving. Whatever you find works for you is probably the best for you. This is unlikely to be booze, drugs or running away but you may need to try this for yourself for a while before you believe it. There is no standard timeline. You do not get over it, you do not move on as if it could be left behind. But you do learn to live with it rather than be consumed by it.

Increasingly, Dr Edwards finds people grieving in her long-time community are seeking her out.

‘It has changed how I practise,’ she said.’ ‘You’re taught not to bring too much of yourself into the consultation, to keep your distance, be professional, as it’s not about you.

‘In a little community, it’s almost impossible to do that. Patients want that sense of connection – especially when they already know your story and you can’t duck away from it.’

Dr Edwards will share parts of her grief with patients to help normalise their own experiences.

‘You almost need to do this in smaller communities, but it might not be appropriate in an urban setting,’ she said. ‘There is power in a shared understanding.

‘Often people want to talk because they know I have that lived experience. Not to acknowledge that would be counterproductive.

‘We’re humans, we like to know we’re not alone. We can be reassuring, to let patients they’re not going mad – that this is a normal response.

‘It can be powerful to hear that from someone who lived it.’

Complete Article HERE!

Patients Want To Die At Home, But Home Hospice Care Can Be Tough On Families

By

“I’m not anti-hospice at at all,” says Joy Johnston, a writer from Atlanta. “But I think people aren’t prepared for all the effort that it takes to give someone a good death at home.”

Even though surveys show it’s what most Americans say they want, dying at home is “not all it’s cracked up to be,” says Johnson, who relocated to New Mexico at age 40 to care for her dying mother some years ago, and ultimately wrote an essay about her frustrations with the way hospice care often works in the U.S.

Johnston, like many family caregivers, was surprised that her mother’s hospice provider left most of the physical work to her. She says during the final weeks of her mother’s life, she felt more like a tired nurse than a devoted daughter.

According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, seven in 10 Americans say they would prefer to die at home, when the time comes. And that’s the direction the health care system is moving, too, hoping to avoid unnecessary and expensive treatment at the end of life.

The home hospice movement has been great for patients, says Vanderbilt palliative care physician Parul Goyal — many patients are thrilled with the care they get.

“I do think that when they are at home, they are in a peaceful environment,” Goyal says. “It is comfortable for them. But,” she notes, “it may not be comfortable for family members watching them taking their last breath.”

Still, when it comes to where we die, the U.S. has reached a tipping point. Home is now the most common place of death, according to new research, and a majority of Medicare patients are now turning to hospice services to help make that possible. Fewer Americans these days are dying in a hospital, under the close supervision of doctors and nurses.

Hospice allows a patient deemed to have fewer than six months to live to change the focus of their medical care — from the goal of curing disease, to a new goal of using treatments and medicines to maintain comfort and quality of life. It is a form of palliative care, which also focuses on pain management and quality of life, but can be provided while a patient continues to seek a cure or receive treatments to prolong life.

Usually, hospice care is offered in the home, or sometimes in a nursing home.

Since the mid-1990s, Medicare has allowed the hospice benefit to cover more types of diagnoses, and therefore more people. As acceptance grows among physicians and patients, the numbers continue to balloon — from 1.27 million patients in 2012 to 1.49 million in 2017.

According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Association, hospice is now a $19 billion industry, almost entirely funded by taxpayers. But as the business has grown, so has the burden on families, who are often the ones providing most of the care.

For example, one intimate task in particular changed Joy Johnston’s view of what hospice really means — trying to get her mom’s bowels moving. Constipation plagues many dying patients.

“It’s ironically called the ‘comfort care kit’ that you get with home hospice. They include suppositories, and so I had to do that,” she says. “That was the lowest point. And I’m sure it was the lowest point for my mother as well. And it didn’t work.”

Hospice agencies primarily serve in an advisory role and from a distance, even in the final, intense days when family caregivers, or home nurses they’ve hired, must continually adjust morphine doses or deal with typical end-of-life symptoms, such as bleeding or breathing trouble. Those decisive moments can be scary for the family, says Dr. Joan Teno, a physician and leading hospice researcher at Oregon Health and Science University.

“Imagine if you’re the caregiver, and that you’re in the house,” Teno says. “it’s in the middle of the night, 2 o’clock in the morning, and all of a sudden, your family member has a grand mal seizure.”

That’s exactly what happened with Teno’s mother.

“While it was difficult for me to witness, I knew what to do,” she says.

In contrast, Teno says, in her father’s final hours, he was admitted to a hospice residence. Such residences often resemble a nursing home, with private rooms where family and friends can come and go, and with round-the-clock medical attention just down the hall.

Teno called the residence experience of hospice a “godsend.” But an inpatient facility is rarely an option, she says. Patients have to be in bad shape for Medicare to pay the higher in-patient rate that hospice residences charge. And by the time such patients reach their final days, it’s often too much trouble for them and the family to move.

Hospice care is a lucrative business — now the most profitable type of health care service that Medicare pays for. According to Medicare data, for-profit hospice agencies now outnumber the nonprofits that pioneered the service in the 1970s. But agencies that need to generate profits for investors aren’t building dedicated hospice units or residences, in general, mostly because such facilities aren’t profitable enough.

Joe Shega, chief medical officer at for-profit Vitas, the largest hospice company in the U.S., insists it’s the patients’ wishes, not a corporate desire to make more money, that drives his firm’s business model. “Our focus is on what patients want, and 85 to 90 percent want to be at home,” Shega says. “So, our focus is building programs that help them be there.”

For many families, making hospice work at home means hiring extra help.

‘I guess I’ve just accepted what’s available’

At the kitchen table of her home outside Nashville, hospice patient Jean McCasland is refusing, on the day I visit, to eat a spoonful of peach yogurt. Each morning, nurse’s aide Karrie Velez pulverizes McCasland’s medications in a pill crusher and mixes them into her breakfast yogurt.

“If you don’t, she will just spit them out,” Velez says.

Like a growing share of hospice patients, McCasland has dementia. She needs a service that hospice rarely provides — a one-on-one health attendant for several hours, so the regular family caregiver can get some kind of break each day.


John McCasland (right) of Goodlettsville, Tenn., hired a private caregiver to help with his wife, Jean (left) who suffered from dementia for eight years. Even when hospice took over, he still found he needed the extra help from Karrie Velez (center). Jean died in October after 13 months on home hospice.

When Velez is not around, John McCasland — Jean’s husband of nearly 50 years — is the person in charge at home.

“I have said from the beginning that was my intention, that she would be at home through the duration, as long as I was able,” John says.

But what hospice provided wasn’t enough help. So he’s had to drain their retirement accounts to hire Velez, a private caregiver, out-of-pocket.

Hospice agencies usually bring in a hospital bed, an oxygen machine or a wheelchair — whatever equipment is needed. Prescriptions show up at the house for pain and anxiety. But hands-on help is scarce.

Medicare says hospice benefits can include home health aides and homemaker services. But in practice, that in-person help is often limited to a couple of baths a week. Medicare data reveals that, on average, a nurse or aide is only in the patient’s home 30 minutes, or so, per day.

Jean McCasland’s husband hasn’t complained. “I guess I’ve just accepted what’s available and not really thought beyond what could be,” John says. “Because this is what they say they do.”

Families rarely consider whether they’re getting their money’s worth, because they’re not paying for hospice services directly: Medicare gets the bills. John keeps his monthly statements from Medicare organized in a three-ring binder, but he’d never noticed his agency charges nearly $200 a day, whether there is a health provider in the home on that day or not.

That daily reimbursement also covers equipment rentals and a 24-hour hotline that lets patients or family members consult a nurse as needed; John says that gives him peace of mind that help is a phone call away. “There’s a sense of comfort in knowing that they are keeping an eye on her,” he says.

The rate that hospice charges Medicare drops a bit after the patient’s first two months on the benefit. After reviewing his paperwork, John realizes Medicare paid the hospice agency $60,000 in the first 12 months Jean was on hospice. Was the care his wife got worth that?

“When you consider the amount of money that’s involved, perhaps they would provide somebody around the clock,” he says.

Sue Riggle is the administrator for the McCaslands’ hospice agency, and says she understands how much help patients with dementia need.

“I think everybody wishes we could provide the sitter-service part of it,” says Riggle. “But it’s not something that is covered by hospices.”

Her company is a small for-profit business called Adoration; she says the agency can’t provide more services than the Medicare benefit pays for.

I checked in again with John and Velez (Jean’s long-time private caregiver) this winter. The two were by Jean’s side — and had been there for several days straight — when she died in October. The hospice nurse showed up only afterward, to officially document the death.

This experience of family caregivers is typical, but often unexpected.

‘It’s a burden I lovingly did’

“It does take a toll” on families, says Katherine Ornstein, an associate professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who studies what typically happens in the last years of patients’ lives. The increasing burden on loved ones — especially spouses — is reaching a breaking point for many people, her research shows. This particular type of stress has even been given a name: caregiver syndrome.

“Our long-term care system in this country is really using families — unpaid family members,” she says. “That’s our situation.”

A few high-profile advocates have even started questioning whether hospice is right for everybody. For some who have gone through home hospice with a loved one, the difficult experience has led them to choose otherwise for themselves.

Social worker Coneigh Sea has a portrait of her husband that sits in the entryway of her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. He died of prostate cancer in their bedroom in 1993.


Coneigh Sea is a social worker from Murfreesboro, Tenn., who cared for her husband as he died on home hospice. Now, she wants to make sure her children don’t do the same for her.

Enough time has passed since then that the mental fog she experienced while managing his medication and bodily fluids — mostly by herself — has cleared, she says. But it was a burden.

“For me to say that — there’s that guilt,” she says, then adds, “but I know better. It was a burden that I lovingly did.”

She doesn’t regret the experience, but says it is not one she wishes for her own grown children. She recently sat them down, she says, to make sure they handle her death differently.

“I told my family, if there is such a thing, I will come back and I will haunt you,” she says with a laugh. “Don’t you do that.”

Sea’s family may have limited options. Sidestepping home hospice typically means paying for a pricey nursing home, or passing away with the cost and potential chaos of a hospital — which is precisely what hospice care was set up to avoid.

As researchers in the field look to the future, they are calling for more palliative care, not less — even as they also advocate for more support of the spouses, family members and friends who are tasked with caring for the patient.

“We really have to expand — in general — our approach to supporting caregivers,” Ornstein says, noting that some countries outside the U.S. pay for a wider range, and longer duration of home health services.

“I think what we really need to do is be broadening the support that individuals and families can have as they’re caring for individuals throughout the course of serious illness,” Ornstein says. “And I think that probably speaks to the expansion of palliative care in general.”

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My 92-Year-Old Father Didn’t Need More Medical Care

Ordering up more tests and surgeries for dying patients is easy. Getting patients the end-of-life care they deserve takes much more effort.

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My 92-year-old father fell one Saturday night a few months ago. My mother could not pick him up. Her brother was not answering his cellphone, so she called 911. An ambulance crew brought him to the hospital.

The emergency-room physician ordered a CT scan. A spot on the scan worried him, so he ordered an MRI, which confirmed that a tumor the size and shape of a pear was occupying the frontal lobes of his brain. Meanwhile, a chest X-ray gave the physician some reason to suspect pneumonia—the image of the lungs looked cloudy, though it lacked the focal infiltrates that usually signify that condition—so he admitted my father to the hospital.

I took the first flight from Washington, D.C., and arrived in his room at a suburban-Chicago hospital at about 9 a.m. He was sitting in a chair, and all sorts of white wires were emerging from under his flimsy hospital gown. His index finger, because of the oxygen monitor attached to it, glowed like E.T.’s. Still, my father was acting like himself. When I entered the room, he mischievously needled me: “How are you doing, schmucko?”

The monitor above his bed showed a regular heart rate and oxygen saturation of 100 percent. The IV pole towering over him showed two empty bags of antibiotics.

I squeezed my dad’s hand, and we talked for about 20 minutes. Then I stepped out of the room to find the doctor to ask some questions. Standing at the nurses’ station, I was introduced to a neurosurgeon and a neuro-oncologist, who were ready to talk to me about my father’s condition and treatment options.

My father had a large brain tumor that could not be cured and would end his life. No neurosurgeon or oncologist could change the inevitable. Especially in light of his age, any intervention that involved drilling into his skull and biopsying or removing part of such a big tumor would only worsen his quality of life. We didn’t want to interfere with him talking with his children and grandchildren and playing with his great-grandchildren during the time he had left.

But no one had taken the time to ask him about his wishes regarding medical treatment, even though he was competent to make decisions and was himself a physician. No one asked my mother and brother, who were with him in the emergency room and at the hospital, if he had an advance-care directive or wanted to have a do-not-resuscitate order. My father, a pediatrician, was one of those doctors who hated getting any medical care. Fifteen years before, he had walked around for three weeks insisting that the pain at the bottom of his rib cage was just acid indigestion. Eventually, he consented to go to his internist and was diagnosed with a heart attack, which required a bypass operation. Everything about the way he’d lived meant he certainly did not want any brain surgery with no chance of a cure. He wanted to die at home having shared his final days with his family.

Since the mid-1980s, I have worked to make this type of end-of-life care possible. I am a physician too. Once my father was admitted to a hospital, it took all my expertise and experience to arrange the kind of care he needed—and prevent the medical system from taking over and prescribing unnecessary interventions.

It was easy for the hospital physician to call a neurosurgeon and neuro-oncologist and for them to assess my father early on a Sunday morning before I arrived. But when I asked if we could get my father a palliative-care consult on Sunday, the answer was a definitive no. All we got was the number of the hospital’s palliative-care service; we had to call the next day, during normal business hours, to arrange a future consultation.

It was easy for the physician to prescribe my father two antibiotics for his supposed pneumonia even though he had none of the symptoms—a fever, ugly-looking phlegm, shortness of breath. Indeed, he was comfortably breathing room air with 100 percent oxygen saturation, which people with pneumonia typically can’t do. But it was impossible for the physician to order an in-home aide to help my father shower, get to and from the bathroom, and navigate the stairs to the living room and kitchen.

It was easy for my mother to call 911 and have him transported to the hospital. But if he fell again, there would be no 911-like number for my mother to call for urgent assistance short of EMTs and ambulances.

It would be easy for the emergency-room physician to admit my father again, and even put him in the intensive-care unit. But no one suggested that he and my mother get mental health care or see a grief counselor to cope with his new terminal diagnosis.

The hospital was no place for my father to spend his last days. To thwart the medical system’s momentum to lard on ever more costly, unnecessary, and unwanted interventions—and to convince the medical staff we were serious about no—I took my father’s oxygen monitor off his finger, disconnected his cardiac monitor, insisted that the nurse remove his IV, and asked the physician to discharge him as soon as possible.

Beyond a suggestion that we find a home-care agency to call, the hospital offered no assistance in getting him help at home. Ironically, the aide transporting him out of the hospital volunteered that she knew someone who was available to provide home care. Through my father’s former nurse and someone she knew, we ended up getting a talented and kind set of cousins—immigrants from the Philippines—who were able to provide care.

Despite the medical system, my father did avoid further trips to the hospital, an ICU admission, and more antibiotics and machines. He spent the rest of his time at home and was able to say goodbye to everyone. And being at home was cheaper. We still don’t have all the bills, but the tab just for about 12 hours in the hospital came to $19,276.83. In contrast, the more than 200 hours of home care he got over the next 10 days cost only $6,093.

Many Americans are puzzled about why end-of-life care costs are so high, and why physicians cannot seem to reduce them. My father’s story is the answer.

It has less to do with physicians’ and hospitals’ financial incentives to admit more patients and perform more medical interventions, and more to do with the effort required to order and provide human care. For providers, ordering tests and consultations and prescribing antibiotics is easier than listening to and diagnosing the particular needs of the person in front of them. It is easier for the medical system to marshal all sorts of costly interventions—MRI scans, hospital admissions, neurosurgeons, cancer chemotherapy, and the rest—but harder, if not impossible, to accept the inevitable and provide symptom management, grief counseling, and home care to patients and their family. Until the system takes account of the whole patient and provides the whole package of humane care as the default—so that it’s routine and made available 24/7 with one physician’s order, just as chemotherapy or an MRI would be—Americans will not be able to finally change end-of-life care and reduce those costs.

A terminal diagnosis is inherently traumatic for patients and their families. My father’s experience at home before his death needs to become the standard of care. And not just for patients with pushy sons who have medical training and know how to speak with physicians, disconnect cardiac monitors, and firmly refuse the interventions that our health-care system is so predisposed to offer.

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