Compassionate, informed advice about healthcare decision making

published by Hank Dunn - May 24th, 2024
Hospice Nurse Julie Says Suffering is Worse Than Dying

Julie McFadden was just interview by “Hospice News.” That would be HospiceNurseJulie to her 347K followers in Instagram, 1.5M followers on TikTok, and 420K subscribers on YouTube. AND she just taped a show with Dr. Phil.

Photo-courtesy-of-Julie-McFadden

Julie also has a book coming out in June, Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully.

It’s a great short interview. Here are some excerpts:

Reflecting on her work as an ICU nurse, she said, “We think [death is] the worst possible thing that could happen, and I think that causes a lot of undue suffering. And suffering to me is far worse than death.”

“I do feel like it was kind of traumatic to be an ICU nurse, at least for me. Hospice was a slower pace. I was in people’s homes. There was a lot of autonomy.”

“Even as an experienced ICU nurse, I feel like I didn’t understand the scope of how our bodies really take care of us, even at the end of life.”

[The interviewer asked] “Can you expound on that a little bit? What are some of the ways that our bodies take care of us?”

“For example, almost everyone wasn’t hungry, wasn’t eating and drinking, and they were sleeping a lot of the time.…. When you start getting towards the end of life, your body knows it. So it starts like turning off that hunger and thirst mechanism in the brain, because it knows that it doesn’t really need that anymore.”

Read it for yourself. Check it out at “Hospice News.”

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Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving People and Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).

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