Compassionate, informed advice about healthcare decision making

Archive for August, 2015

Slow Down, You Are Doing Too Much

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“Let her go in peace,” was my bottom-line message.

ER trips, IV antibiotics, bulb syringes … all had become extraordinary measures … in my view.

A woman called me out of the blue yesterday. A hospice worker had given her my Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Artificial Feeding, Comfort Care, and the Patient with a Life-Threatening Illness. I am not exactly sure what she wanted from me as she talked rapidly and pretty much constantly through our close to an hour on the phone.

This never-married woman was the primary caregiver for her 96-year-old mother. The old lady had suffered strokes and dementia was advancing. Because of the swallowing difficulty the daughter was forcing food into her mother’s mouth with a bulb syringe. This is a rubber device, shaped like a tear drop. You suck food into the bulb then stick the narrow end into the patient’s mouth and force the contents out.

Medical professionals encouraged the daughter to slow down

It sounds like the medical professionals in both hospice and the hospital have encouraged the daughter to slow down. But she has sent her mom to the ER three times over the last several weeks. “Maybe if they just give her some IV hydration she would start eating better,” her logic went.

Having listened for about a half hour I asked her, “What is the future for your mother?”

“She is dying.”

Bingo. She said what I was hoping for. In hundreds of such conversations over the years I have asked questions to help caregivers come to their own conclusion about the big picture.

Dying people stop eating and drinking at the end of life. Dying people probably will dehydrate leading to a more peaceful and compassionate death. Dying people talk less and sleep more. Dying people can get aspiration pneumonia once known as “the old man’s friend.”

“I feel so guilty all the time”

Then the lady moved into my chaplain’s area. “I feel so guilty all the time.” She wept.

“Guilty? For what?” Caregiver guilt is not uncommon.

Once, when she mentioned to a doctor she felt guilty for not doing enough, he said, “If you want to feel guilty about something, feel guilty for doing all this to your mother.” I wouldn’t have said it that way. But basically I suggested she start doing less.

I recommended that if she wanted her mother to have a peaceful death at home she not call the rescue squad, she not use antibiotics for aspiration pneumonia, and maybe stop using the bulb syringe. Oh…and she stop feeling guilty.

I actually have little hope she will stop feeling guilty as it has been her constant companion since childhood she told me. But I did tell her, “You can never make a wrong decision. You do the best you can with the information you have at the time. That is all we can ask of anyone. Maybe later will you look back and see how things could have been done differently. But in the moment you just do the best you can.”

 

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We Didn’t Want to Put Him Through That Again

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I just got off the phone with the widow of an old friend of mine. She called to let me know her husband died last week. I hadn’t heard. He was 70. Alzheimer’s.

I’m not sure he knew me

I last saw him in October on my way to a speaking engagement near Orlando. This was the week before he entered a memory care unit. I’m not sure he knew me. He told stories and laughed like he always did but his words made no sense.

We had grown up in the same neighborhood and I followed him three years behind to the University of Florida. He played baseball, me football. He went into law, me the ministry. Over the years I would stop by and we would go fishing. He loved to fish the lakes.

His wife told me he died from aspiration pneumonia. A very typical way for advanced dementia patients to go. They get food or fluid in their lungs and an infection follows. Often these patients are treated with antibiotics and the pneumonia is cleared up. Then the decline of the patient continues and they get pneumonia again, etc., etc.

“We didn’t want to put him through that again.”

They refused antibiotics and called hospice. She told me he died the most peaceful death.

Around Christmas he had gone into the hospital and “it was a horrible experience.” “We didn’t want to put him through that again.” They didn’t.

I told her she did the right thing. I said, “It is so routine to put the people in the hospital, pump antibiotics into them and they are saved only to get worse. I cannot say enough good things about how you handled this. It is so out of the norm but in my view the best of care.”

Hank

 

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