You’ll remember these words forever…
Powerful Advice From A Dying Man
Life after death and the fear of dying
By Heidi Anderson
[O]n the 16th of August this year, my beautiful 96 year-old Nan passed away. Since then, I have rode one hell of a roller-coaster with my emotions all over the shop.
Nan and I always had a pact that if there were something on the other side, that she would come back and tell me about it.
She never believed there was anything else after you die and she would always say to me: “Once you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. There is nothing else.”
That is what terrifies me. The thought of “that’s it” petrifies me. I’m seriously scared of dying and for years this has given me anxiety.
I have worked with my psychologist about this fear. Dying is inevitable, but I still find it so hard to comprehend.
I’m not sure any of the sessions have helped, I still think about it a lot.
People constantly say to me: “Why stress about something you have no control of?”
Or, “You won’t know when you’re dead that you’re dead, so chill out.”
Believe me, if I could switch it off I would but that’s easier said than done. It’s not the thought of how I die that bothers or upsets me, it’s the thought of the unknown. Not knowing what’s next.
This consumes my thoughts far too often and it’s something that I have tried to come to terms with over the past few years with no such luck.
When my Mum told me that Nan was dying and she wouldn’t recover from her fall, I flew straight to her bedside, along with all the family.
Saying goodbye to my Nan was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.
Once Nan knew herself that she was dying and had accepted her fate, she called me into her room to speak. At this stage, she didn’t have much energy but she was putting all her fight into saying goodbye to people individually.
“Heidi, we all die. That’s life,” she said to me. “That’s the one thing are guaranteed in life. We’re born to die.”
Looking back, I think Nan was speaking to herself, as she too was always so afraid of death.
Over the next few days, Nan went downhill and eventually she stopped speaking and just slept.
Family came and went and said their goodbyes, but I stayed around.
I wanted to be with Nan as she exited this world. I wanted to hold her hand as she took her last breath.
Looking back, I think I also wanted to confront my fear of death. If I saw what actually happens, maybe I wouldn’t be so scared.
So I hung around the hospital like a bad smell, rarely leaving Nan’s bedside.
I played her music, told her stories and relived all our good times.
Unfortunately, by that stage she was no longer talking, but she would twitch her lips or flicker her eyes.
I swear she could hear everything, she just couldn’t respond.
In the end, I flew home to Perth. She was holding on and I felt Nan just didn’t want to die in front of any of her grandkids.
12 hours after I got home, Nan took her last breath with her three daughters at her side.
The nurses at the hospital said it was very common for people, when they’re dying, to choose who is with them.
Although I wanted so desperately to be with Nan, I felt she knew it was best that I wasn’t there.
When I arrived home in Bathurst for her funeral, I still felt that I wanted to confront my fear of death and see Nan.
Mum took me to the funeral home the morning of her farewell and I saw Nan for the first time since she passed away.
She was dead and she even looked it. No amount of makeup was hiding the fact that she was gone.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Nan was dead and she was never coming back.
Thoughts started flooding my brain.
“Where is she? Is there something else out there? Is she with Pop? What happens? Where has she gone?”
Her body was there but that wasn’t my Nan.
My friends asked later if she looked peaceful and I found that hard to explain. She looked like she was gone and that is something I won’t ever really understand.
I’m not sure seeing my Nan in her coffin has helped my fear of dying, but it definitely gave me some kind of closure.
I am still waiting for Nan’s spirit to visit me and let me know if there is anything else out there.
I have had a couple of dreams about her and I talk to her all the time but I am yet to feel her or hear if there is life after death.
Complete Article HERE!
In death reunited: 75 years after Pearl Harbor attack, Anderson brothers of Dilworth, Minn., will rest together in USS Arizona
[J]ohn Anderson somehow survived the bloody mayhem of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
But in that attack, Anderson, a crewman on the USS Arizona, lost his twin brother, Jake.
Jake was among 1,177 sailors and Marines from the battleship who died, many of whom were entombed when the ship sank in minutes after a bomb touched off a massive explosion in one of the magazines.
Throughout an active and full life, Anderson carried the guilt of not being able to find his brother.
Now, in death, the brothers from Dilworth, Minn., will be reunited.
Anderson’s cremains, along with those of another man who survived that attack 75 years ago, will be interred by Navy divers in the No. 4 turret of the Arizona on Wednesday, Dec. 7.
Their cremains will join those of about 1,100 sailors and Marines entombed in the wreck.
“When you grow up in the shadow of a hero, you don’t always realize a hero is there,” one of his sons, Terry Anderson, 53, of Roswell, N.M., said Friday, Dec. 2. “We have a great sense of pride.”
Karolyn Anderson, 73, said that it’s been a difficult year since her husband’s death Nov. 14, 2015, at the age of 98.
“This is what John would want. I want to do that for John, and Jake. It’s very sad for me, but I’m honoring his wishes and his memory,” the Roswell woman said of her husband of 47 years.
“For years, John was hesitant to even talk about Jake, He always carried a guilt burden that he couldn’t get Jake. And finally one day, I said ‘John, you never really mention Jake, why is that?’ And he said. ‘I always felt funny that I lived and he didn’t. I always wondered why I was spared and he wasn’t.’ He just felt like he let himself down, and Jake down as well as the rest of the family.”
John and Jake Anderson were born Aug. 26, 1917, in Verona, N.D. Their family later moved to Dilworth, where the twins grew up and graduated from high school.
Both joined the Navy in March 1937.
John Anderson began his Navy career on the USS Saratoga, then transferred to a destroyer. He was in China when it was attacked by the Japanese.
“That left an impact on him. He had pictures of a Chinese refugee column machine gunned by the Japanese. Pretty graphic stuff,” Terry Anderson said.
In 1940, he was transferred to Hawaii and eventually to the Arizona.
John was a member of a crew manning one of the ship’s 14-inch turret guns, and Jake’s station was an anti-aircraft gun. John Anderson also had the duty of setting up chairs for Sunday morning worship services on the Arizona’s deck. After setting up the chairs on Dec. 7, he went below deck to have breakfast when he heard a “kaplunk,” looked out a porthole and saw planes bombing nearby Ford Island, he told columnist Bob Lind of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.
“They started hearing machine gun fire and explosions going off, and Dad went to the porthole of the ship out of the mess hall and that’s when he saw the Japanese planes flying by and he saw the orange balls and he knew the Japanese were there, because he had seen them in China,” said another son, John Anderson Jr., 47 of Carlsbad, N.M..
John Anderson said in accounts after the war that he then headed for his post, all the while looking for his brother, Jake. He made it to his gun turret, but before he could help load it, a bomb hit the turret’s top, bounced off and penetrated the deck. The resulting explosion killed many of the crew.
Shortly after, the forward ammunition magazine with 1.5 million pounds of gunpowder blew up, virtually splitting the Arizona, and leaving dead and dying men everywhere, he told Lind.
As the ship began sinking, a senior officer ordered Anderson onto a barge taking wounded men to Ford Island, and they picked up wounded men on the way.
Once on the island, Anderson commandeered another boat to go back to the Arizona with a shipmate, Chester Rose. On the way, they pulled survivors from the harbor, but then the small craft was hit and wrecked, and all but John perished.
“He talked about this guy Rose many many times, about how he lost his life trying to help, go back to the ship. After (many) years, he was able to locate the family and tell the family what happened to Rose,” John Jr. said.
John Anderson was wounded, but swam to land and grabbed a rifle and two bandoliers of ammunition. He then jumped into a bomb blast crater on Ford Island and told Lind that he thought, “Let ’em come!”
In a 2014 article, he told the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the next day a Marine patrol told him survivors of the Arizona were to gather on a nearby dock for a head count.
“Everybody I saw there had rags around their heads,” Anderson said. Bandages covered their arms, skin was scorched and hair was burned off. “Beat up something awful.”
Travis Anderson, 45, of Kurtistown, Hawaii, said his father passed on a very memorable lesson learned on that horrible day.
“I don’t remember what we were doing, but he said there’s a reason for rules and doing things the right way, and I kind of smarted off to him and he told me to listen,” Travis Anderson said. “He told me a story about a man locked up on the Arizona. He was in the brig and no one could find the key. Boy, that just hit me like a ton of bricks. That they were trying to get that guy out of there and they didn’t have the key. Pay attention to what you’re doing and do things right. I carried that with me the rest of my life.”
John Anderson joined the destroyer USS Macdonough, and fought in 13 major battles across the Pacific.
After his discharge in 1945, he worked as a movie stuntman and took night classes in meteorology. A friend later convinced him to join the Navy Reserves, where he served for another 23 years.
While in Hollywood, he met and worked with John Wayne and also worked on the set of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas staple, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Anderson moved to Roswell, where he was “Cactus Jack,” a disc jockey playing mostly country music. He met Elvis Presley and Eddie Arnold in that job.
Anderson later became a television meteorologist and a real estate agent.
“He went after it. He lived life to the fullest. It was like reading a Hollywood book. He really lived. I could just go on and on,” Travis Anderson said.
“He was a wonderful man, very charismatic. He was bigger than life,” Karolyn added.
The interment ceremony on the Arizona is unique in that it is the only ship in the U.S. Navy where the cremated remains of a survivor are returned.
“It will be a chance to say goodbye to dad and a chance to reflect on Dec. 7. A day we should never forget,” John Jr. said. “It will be a time … to thank God for all he did.”
Complete Article HERE!
Immortal prose: how writers deal with death
Julian Barnes, Joan Didion, Jenny Diski, Christopher Hitchens, Meghan O’Rourke and more address life’s ultimate question
By
[W]oody Allen famously quipped “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” This resonates with all of us who live in a culture that promotes eternal youth through scalpel or scientific miracle and cold shoulders the icy certainty of death.
Kafka stated that “the meaning of life is that it stops” while Anaïs Nin, a daily diarist, wrote that “people living deeply have no fear of death”. Freud recognised that people sometimes did express fear of death, a condition referred to as thanatophobia. Freud felt that it was not actual death that people feared as our own death is quite unimaginable, and in our unconscious we are all convinced of our own immortality. Beckett wrote that “they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”. Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”.
Lately there has been much written about death, narratives and stories that aim to help us negotiate the emotional landscape of grief and death. The novelist Julian Barnes is a self-confessed thanatophobe who sometimes is “roared awake” and “pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world”. In his memoir on the fear of non-existence, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes writes an elegant meditation on death and attempts to address his thanophobia. As an agnostic Barnes doesn’t believe in an afterlife and writes that “I don’t believe in God but I miss him”. He believes that the Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie… a tragedy with a happy ending”, and yet he misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in a Mozart Requiem or the sculptures of Donatello.
There is a trend over the last few years for a new type of fiction, a genre that moulds memoir with biography to form a literature that feels fresh and hyper-real, a type of reality fiction for the modern reader. David Shields presaged this new trend when in his 2010 publication Reality Hunger he advocated a return to the “real” in literature and he railed against conventional plot-driven fiction in favour of the lyric essay and the memoir.
A memoir of illness and dying is always an emotional read and the pages pulse with life, strife and the emotional intensity of the author’s feelings and predicament. None more so than In Gratitude by Jenny Diski, who died earlier this year of inoperable lung cancer. Diski wrote a series of essays in the London Review of Books about life after her diagnosis with its frailties and sudden fragilities which have been published as this memoir. She writes that she feared the oncologist would find her response cliched after he gave her the prognosis and she turned to her husband and suggested that they’d better get cooking the meth like Heisenberg in the television series Breaking Bad.
Diski’s talon-sharp prose has never harboured a platitude and this memoir touches on her peripatetic early life, abandoned by neglectful parents and in and out of psychiatric hospitals, “rattling from bin to bin”. She was adopted by the writer Doris Lessing for four years as a teenager and shared family dinners with Alan Sillitoe, RD Laing and Arnold Wesker and listened to late-night intellectual discussions about philosophy and psychotherapy which she describes as “a dream come true, but I had to work out how to live it”.
Diski with her unique sense of directness and humour writes that she makes an ideal candidate to play the role of a cancer patient as her lifelong favourite places are bed and sofa and she lives like one of those secondary characters in Victorian literature who constantly languish on the fainting couch. Diski described herself as being “contrary-minded”, delighted at breaking taboos and pushing boundaries. Controversial to the end, she likens having cancer to “an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed, I have been given this role ….I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.”
Christopher Hitchens was on a book tour for Hitch 22 when he experienced the first health crisis that was the beginning of his demise. However, this pugnacious and witty writer was able to channel his experiences into his end of life memoir Mortality, which begins with the line “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death”. When the emergency services arrive to collect him Hitchens feels a psychogeographical shift taking him “from the country of the well to the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady”. Hitchens concedes that he has become a finalist in the race of life and quotes from TS Eliot’s Prufrock:
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker / And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat / and snicker / And in short / I was afraid
Hitch decided to live dyingly and extolled the consolation of friends who came to eat, drink and converse with him even as these earthly delights become impossible for him as the cancer progressed. His memoir is life affirming, punchy and rich with morbid humour, noting that when one falls ill people tend to send Leonard Cohen CDs. He doesn’t experience rage at a terminal diagnosis as he feels that he has been taunting the Reaper into “taking a free scythe in my direction” and that he has now succumbed to “something so predictable and banal that it bores me”. His wife Carol Blue in the afterword to this memoir writes of the man she admired and loved and ends with the lines that in death as in life Hitch still has the last word.
Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins with the death of her husband of 44 years, the writer John Dunne, and brings the reader on a journey through the land of grief that she entered in the aftermath of his loss. In the opening lines of this poised but passionate memoir she writes that “life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” She writes about the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event and writes that when we are confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how “unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell.’’
Didion gives the reader an unflinching account of grief in the year when the shock of Dunne’s death “was obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind”. Despite the unshakeable reality of her husband’s death Joan’s thinking enters the realm of the magical and she writes that “we do not expect to be crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes”.
Zadie Smith wrote that Didion is essential reading on the subject of death and I have bought many copies over the years for grieving friends who have found comfort in its reading, recognition of their suffering in its pages.
The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is an unstintingly honest memoir about the loss of her mother Barbara to colorectal cancer. O’Rourke is an award-winning poet and she writes about the consolation that she finds in reading Hamlet. Shakespeare’s hero holds up a mirror to O’Rourke’s own duality of emotion; emptiness and anger, despair and longing for relief. O’Rourke can understand why Hamlet, who has just lost his father, is angry and cagey. He is told that how he feels is unmanly and unseemly, his uncle greeting him with the worst question to ask a grieving person “How is it that that the cloud still hang on you?”
O’Rourke felt a resonance with Hamlet in her grief state when she felt that to descend to the deepest fathom of it would be unseemly and was somehow taboo. She writes that nothing prepared her for the death of her mother, even knowing that she had terminal cancer did not prepare her. There is a stark unearthing of truths in this memoir. “A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky, unimaginable.”
Doctors face death daily and Dr Paul Kalanithi became a neurosurgeon because with its unforgiving call to “perfection, it seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity and death”. When Breath Becomes Air opens with a description by the author of a CT scan that he was examining where the lungs were matted with innumerable tumours, the spine deformed and a full lobe of the liver obliterated. This scan, though similar to scores of others that he had examined over the previous six years, was different, different because it was his own. Kalanithi wrote his memoir in the aftermath of this discovery, fusing his medical knowledge with his love of literature to produce a work that is more than a memoir: it is a philosophical reflection on life and purpose. Kalanithi and his wife have a baby Cady who was eight months old when her father died. His memoir will be his legacy to his little girl as “words”, he writes, “have a longevity I do not”.
The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts tells of Coutts’ partner Tom Lubbock’s death from a malignant brain tumour. This account of illness and decline is told with an artist’s eye and in poetic prose that is both razor sharp and suffused with emotion. Coutts writes that there is a filmic quality to their life. A friend suggests that the director is Bergman, “shot flat without affect but deeply charged, with a fondness for long shots, no cuts, ensemble scenes, dark comedy and the action geared always to the man in the bed even though he is frequently off camera.”
Death is the inevitable full stop in the essay of life. Christopher Hitchens quotes this poem by Kingsley Amis in his memoir Mortality: Death has this much to be said for it/ You don’t have to get out of bed for it/Wherever you happen to be/ They bring it to you – free.
The writer Katie Roiphe wrote The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End in part to sate her curiosity about death and dying. It is an account of how the writer found beauty and comfort in the stories of how her literary heroes faced up to dying. For Roiphe religion has never been consoling and feels like a foreign language. She, like many book lovers finds comfort in novels and poems. As a child recovering from serious illness Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium resonated with her. She becomes ambushed by the beauty in the deaths of her literary heroes, Dylan Thomas, Susan Sontag, Freud and Maurice Sendak. Sontag “fought her death to the end, believing on some deep irrational level she would be the one exception”.
Roiphe feels that writers and artists are more attuned to death, that they can put the confrontation with mortality into words in a way that most of us can’t or won’t. The last taboo has been dealt with by memoirists, essayists and poets. If, according to FR Leavis, literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness, then these publications are a gateway to enlightenment.
Complete Article HERE!
A touching and humorous look at death in ‘Last Rights’
By
At some point, most of us give at least a little thought to the concept of death, whether our own or a loved one’s. Though we may not want to think about the end of life, it is inevitable, hopefully later rather than sooner.
With a mix of famous quotes, quick sound bites and a few touching stories, the new play “Last Rights” encourages audiences to think and talk about death a lot more. In fact, the point of this original Florida Studio Theatre documentary theater production is to stimulate conversation as part of its ongoing “For the Ages” project exploring issues surrounding aging.
As one character says, we know a lot about the birthing process, but few of us actually know what happens at death. There’s a lot to learn, and you get some lessons in “Last Rights.”
Assembled and directed by Jason Cannon from more than 100 interviews with area residents, including caregivers, hospice workers, journalists and loved ones of those who died, the production is presented in Bowne’s Lab as a reading of sorts. The six cast members stand with scripts in hand ((and)) when it’s their turn ((they)) ((delete-to)) share a story or offer one-line thoughts.
“People breathe much longer than they’re alive,” one man notes, while another says, “If we understood death better, we’d be less afraid.”
Considering the subject, the play is surprisingly humorous, as it touches on everything from the many euphemisms for death to famous last words, fear of death, dying with a sense of dignity during treatment for an illness, what we expect after death, grieving, and how survivors learn to move on in their lives.
Three widows complain about how their friends avoid them because they don’t have the words to express their sympathy and other feelings.
Get over it, and call.
The actors generally play recurring characters, like Bob Mowry’s compassionate, well-informed and experienced hospice worker who shares some personal stories and important legal information about patients’ rights to refuse care. Ann Gundersheimer is grounded and moving as a gerentologist ((sp?)) providing insights into aging and death. Mark Konrad plays a man who has one year left to live and wants to make the most of it. (Did the year end before the show ((?)) ((B))ecause the character disappears after a while) Sharon Ohrenstein plays an enthusiastic home health aide and Ana Maria Larson is extremely moving as she talks about taking care of her grandfather((,))who wasn’t ready to give up on life.
Michael Kinsey has the strongest through line as a gay man who shares memories of his late first husband and how they mesh into the life he has with his second. But he worries about what happens in the afterlife. Husband No. 1 told him, “I’ll see you on the other side.” ((W))hat happens when he shows up with husband No. 2 ((?))
The play is divided into five sections over two acts that run longer than needed without more compelling story arcs, like the stories Kinsey shares. There is no real narrative, just groupings of ideas and thoughts built around specific topics. There’s a nicely staged moment at the end of the “Any Last Words” section that ((would have provided ((Delete-provides)) a nice finale to the first act, but there’s still another section to go.
The cast, however, keeps us interested, and the play raises a lot of issues that are certainly of concern to the older FST audience and should be of interest and thought for those decades younger. “Last Rights” does have the ability, in an easily digestible way, to make you consider the possibilities of how you want to go.
Complete Article HERE!
Maybe We Don’t Need To Fear Death At All
We all joke about dying one day, but when someone we love passes on it no longer becomes the punch line to a vulgar joke—instead the thought of death becomes a subtle pain that lingers within our heart for the rest of our lives.
Death is a scary concept. Not knowing if the next breath is our last, and if and when we will have enough time to say our goodbyes—that’s frightening.
Death has taken some of the most important people in my life too soon, but maybe death is not something to fear. Maybe death is a beautiful beginning; a fresh start where the people we cherish feel no pain and watch over us as we continue to live our everyday lives.
I am not saying that death is something to feel joyful about—it is okay to feel dejected; it’s okay to cry and mourn the loss of someone you loved. What I am saying is that maybe we are overlooking the positive aspect that stems from such a heart-rending event.
When someone is taken from us suddenly, we find ourselves stuck in a place of confusion and despair because life without them doesn’t seem plausible. I can’t help but think of one of the most common phrases that I’ve heard over and over again–“It is a shame, he or she was taken way too soon.” I found myself consumed with that phrase and was constantly questioning why some people died so young, why some people would suffer for years before passing, or why some people were blessed with a long healthy lifespan.
But maybe death is like a tragic love story—the outcome results in death, but the journey is trotted fearlessly by people who are adventurous and driven by the idea of living a full life despite their questionable duration on this Earth.
We spend so much time fearing death, when we really should fear not living.
Like Shakespeare said, everyone owes God one good death. We were put here with a purpose and with no indication of how long we will have. So why are we avoiding living our lives to the greatest extent when death is inevitable? Why are we so afraid to take that next step that can potentially alter the rest of our lives?
The truth of the matter is, death does not discriminate—it doesn’t matter what race you are, your gender, what your income is, or whether you are young or old. It doesn’t factor in whether you are compassionate, malicious, timid, or loud. It is because of this that death should not be dreaded, but should be the reason we live the life we have been given exactly the way we want to.
Maybe death exists so we realize just how precious our time is—death should not be viewed as this dark morbid being, but as a mysterious presence that pushes us to do the things that frighten us the most.
We don’t know when we will say our final words. We don’t know what we are going to be feeling the moment that life is taken away from us. So what has the death of my loved ones done to me? It has fueled me to take every opportunity that is put in front of me, and experience every moment like it is my last. So Death—the motivation to live a full life daringly before it brings you to your new beginning.
Complete Article HERE!
How To Fight For Yourself At The Hospital — And Avoid Readmission
Everything initially went well with Barbara Charnes’ surgery to fix a troublesome ankle. But after leaving the hospital, the 83-year-old soon found herself in a bad way.
Dazed by a bad response to anesthesia, the Denver resident stopped eating and drinking. Within days, she was dangerously weak, almost entirely immobile and alarmingly apathetic.
“I didn’t see a way forward; I thought I was going to die, and I was OK with that,” Charnes remembered, thinking back to that awful time in the spring of 2015.
Her distraught husband didn’t know what to do until a longtime friend — a neurologist — insisted that Charnes return to the hospital.
That’s the kind of situation medical centers are trying hard to prevent. When hospitals readmit aging patients more often than average, they can face stiff government penalties.
But too often institutions don’t take the reality of seniors’ lives adequately into account, making it imperative that patients figure out how to advocate for themselves.
“People tell us over and over ‘I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened’ and ‘My needs weren’t anticipated,’” said Mary Naylor, director of the New Courtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania.
It’s a mistake to rely on hospital staff to ensure that things go smoothly; medical centers’ interests (efficiency, opening up needed beds, maximizing payments, avoiding penalties) are not necessarily your interests (recovering as well as possible, remaining independent and easing the burden on caregivers).
Instead, you and a family member, friend or caregiver need to be prepared to ask plenty of questions and push for answers.
Here’s what doctors, health policy experts, geriatric care managers, older adults and caregivers recommend:
Start Planning Now
Planning for a transition home should begin as soon as you’re admitted to the hospital, advised Connie McKenzie, who runs Firstat RN Care Management Services in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. You may be too ill to do this, so have someone you trust ask your physician how long you’re likely to be hospitalized and whether you’ll be sent home or to rehabilitation afterward.
Ask if a physical therapist can evaluate you or your loved one at the hospital. Can you get out of bed by yourself? Walk across the room? Then discuss what difficulties might arise back home. Will you be able to handle your own bathroom needs? Get dressed? Climb stairs? What kind of assistance will you require?
Request a consultation with a nutritionist. What kinds of foods will and won’t you be able to eat? Does your diet need to change over the short term, or longer term?
Consider where you’ll go next. If you or your loved one is going to need rehabilitation, now is the time to start researching facilities. Ask a hospital social worker for advice or, if you can afford it, hire a geriatric care manager (now called aging life care professionals) to walk you through your options.
Before Being Discharged
Don’t wait to learn about the kind of care that will be required at home. Will a wound need to be dressed? A catheter need tending to? What’s the best way to do this? Have a nurse show you, step by step, and then let you practice in front of her — several times, if that’s what it takes.
Ann Williams watched a nurse give her 77-year-old mother a shot of Warfarin two years ago after being hospitalized for a dangerous blood clot. But when it was Williams’ turn to give the injection on her own, she panicked.
“I’m not a medical professional: I’ve only given allergy shots to my cats,” she said. Fortunately, Williams found a good instructional video on the Internet and watched it over and over.
Make sure you ask your doctor to sit down and walk you through what will happen next. How soon might you or your loved one recover? What should you expect if things are going well? What should you do if things are going poorly? How will you know if a trip back to the hospital is necessary?
If the doctor or a nurse rushes you, don’t be afraid to say, “Please slow down and repeat that” or “Can you be more specific?” or “Can you explain that using simple language?” said Dr. Suzanne Mitchell, an assistant professor of family medicine at Boston University’s School of Medicine.
Getting Ready To Leave
Being discharged from a hospital can be overwhelming. Make sure you have someone with you to ask questions, take good notes and stand up for your interests — especially if you feel unprepared to leave the hospital in your current state, said Jullie Gray, a care manager with Aging Wisdom in Seattle.
This is the time to go over all the medications you’ll be taking at home, if you haven’t done so already. Bring in a complete list of all the prescriptions and over-the-counter medications you’ve been taking. You’ll want to have your physician or a pharmacist go over the entire list to make sure there aren’t duplicates or possibly dangerous interactions. Some hospitals are filling new prescriptions before patients go home; take advantage of this service if you can. Or get a list of nearby pharmacies that can fill medication orders.
Find out if equipment that’s been promised has been delivered. Will there be a hospital bed, a commode or a shower chair at home when you get there? How will you obtain other supplies that might be needed such as disposable gloves or adult diapers? A useful checklist can be found at Next Step in Care, a program of the United Hospital Fund.
Will home health care nurses be coming to offer a helping hand? If so, has that been scheduled — and when? How often will the nurses come, and for what period of time? What, exactly, will home health caregivers do and what other kinds of assistance will you need to arrange on your own? What will your insurance pay for?
Be sure to get contact information (phone numbers, cell phone numbers, email addresses) for the doctor who took care of you at the hospital, the person who arranged your discharge, a hospital social worker, the medical supply company and the home health agency. If something goes wrong, you’ll want to know who to contact.
Don’t leave without securing a copy of your medical records and asking the hospital to send those records to your primary care doctor.
Back At Home
Seeing your primary care doctor within two weeks should be a priority. “Even if a patient seems to be doing really well, having their doctor lay eyes on them is really important,” said Dr. Kerry Hildreth, an assistant professor of geriatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
When you call for an appointment, make sure you explain that you’ve just been in the hospital.
Adjust your expectations. Up to one-third of people over 70 and half of those over 80 leave the hospital with more disabilities than when they arrived. Sometimes, seniors suffer from anxiety and depression after a traumatic illness; sometimes, they’ll experience problems with memory and attention. Returning to normal may take time or a new normal may need to be established. A physical or occupational therapist can help, but you may have to ask the hospital or a home health agency to help arrange these visits. Often, they won’t offer.
It took a year for Barbara Charnes to stand up and begin walking after her ankle operation, which was followed by two unexpected hospitalizations and stints in rehabilitation. For all the physical difficulties, the anguish of feeling like she’d never recover her sense of herself as an independent person was most difficult.
“I felt that my life, as I had known it, had ended,” she said, “but gradually I found my way forward.”
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