Hospice

[BBB]

I'm sure I will get some opposite views here but personally I hate the fact that Medicare dictates what type of hospice you can get. Medicare has rules and basically requires a medical need to go into Inpatient Hospice. Everyone today does home hospice and while I get that some people like that since their loved one dies at home, my son is now traumatized after watching his mother deteriorate.

 

[jwahlquist]

I don’t have much experience with hospice really.  My grandpa had cancer and had some type of home care after he became terminal.  I remember it being really hard to see him wither away.  My husband’s grandma was at an inpatient hospice because she was very ill.  I am not sure that was easier because seeing her even a week in was a shock.  I don’t think there is a perfect answer.   
 

My husband passed away in the ICU and my last memories of him will always be him hooked up to tubes and machines.  Him being pale and ill looking and not the vibrant person I had always known.  So that leads me to believe that no matter how your loved one dies it is traumatic.

[foreverhis]

I wish my husband had been able to come home on hospice as planned.  I wish that for his sake, not mine.  I don't truly know if it would have made a difference to him on his last day, but I do know that he wanted to come home.  That I wasn't able to do that for him pains me deeply.  I had asked him, "Honey, do you want to go home?" and he said he did.  So I said, "Okay, let's go home.  I'll start getting that ready."  And then I had him put on full comfort care.  But it was Friday and he couldn't be moved home until Monday. 

We, that is I, waited too long and his body started to fail Sunday night so that they moved us into a large private room with huge picture windows into a beautiful courtyard.  It was better there because it was quiet.  He no longer had multiple IVs and machines beeping and people in and out constantly.  But I believe he would have been more at peace taking his last breath in the house we had made a home for more than 20 of our 35 years together.

Our girls came to visit just a couple of weeks before he died.  He was in the hospital then.  Our granddaughter was 9 at the time.  She had trouble grasping that her beloved grandpa would not be coming home each night to be with us, so that was actually fairly traumatic for her.  Amazingly, she was not afraid of the changes in him.  She just wanted to have her grandpa, no matter where or how.  I'm not sure which would have been worse for her.  I'm not sure it would have mattered because all that mattered to her was losing him.

At heart, I have to agree with jwahlquist that no matter where it happens, the trauma of loss and the shattering of our hearts will be just as deep.  So I guess it's yet another of the individual and uniquely painful experiences.

[KayC]

All hospice is not equal, that I have learned in talking/listening to people over the years.  When my MIL was bedridden with cancer for three years, and I was taking care of her, they were wonderful and helpful, except the one that tried to have an affair with my FIL...I reported her and admit I did not mourn when I read her obituary a few years later.  I still remember the other one who came out and she was so wonderful with her, with all of us!