Serious content alert. As I have mentioned in previous posts, writing Your Room at the End: Thoughts About Aging We’d Rather Avoid was a difficult task for me. I approach all my book projects with enthusiasm, relishing the research for the non-fiction, seeking ways to make the material entertaining as well as interesting from a factual perspective. In some cases, I have to change passages as I discover that my information was either outdated or incorrect, and I have no problem with that. With Your Room, however, the emotional intensity never waivered, even as I moved into Part II which deals with more pleasant topics than does Part I.
This post is specifically about the decision to bring hospice into a situation and I took special care to meet more than once with hospice personnel because I wanted to make sure that I presented that portion of the book in as candid, yet gentle a way as I could. There are many excellent sites to visit to get detailed information about hospice, but perhaps the two most important things to understand is that there is no Hospice with a capital “H”. Hospice is a philosophy and many of their services are covered under Medicare, but hospice organizations are not arranged identically and there are variations in how they operate. This is why it is very important to find out what organizations are in the area where the individual entering hospice is located. Hospice usually has arrangements with care facilities in the event that an individual does not wish to, or cannot be, in a home setting.
The essence of hospice is that when an individual decides he or she wants no more medical intervention – no more treatments, no more medication except for pain relief, no more trips to emergency rooms, they will be made as comfortable as possible until such time as the illness or injury takes the final toll. (And yes, one can enter hospice and then change one’s mind.) Even though hospice is most often associated with cancer, any condition deemed terminal within an estimated six months qualifies for hospice care. The main point to hospice is that the individual understands that death is probable in the near future and the preference is not to continue with medical solutions that will prolong life, but may decrease the quality of time remaining. This is never an easy decision and friends and family may have more difficulty with it than the individual making the choice. If you are coping with a relative or other loved one who is struggling with a terminal illness/injury, it might be a good idea to find out what the hospice situation is in your area.
