My husband, Craig, didn’t want to spend his last days in the hospital. His fight with bladder cancer then became a battle to get him hospice
Cancer is such a cruel disease and it is often hideously ugly in ways you can’t imagine until you go through it or you participate in caretaking of someone with advanced cancer. I have cared for patients with fungating tumors requiring 2-3 complex dressing changes per day, patients who are incontinent with skin so excoriated from diarrhea that cleaning and changing them is agonizingly painful, patients whose pain requires a dilaudid drip for them to be remotely comfortable. These people often die in the hospital alone because home hospice doesn’t provide 24/7 medical care, just a nurse a few times a week to check in on them and do a few hours of nursing care. The burden of that care outside of those visits falls to the families who are are not medically trained and not emotionally equipped to deal with such extensive caretaking. Families often don’t want to take that (with good reason) and so dying happens in the hospital where it is harder to ensure someone is at bedside at all times. The dying process can take a long time and families may do their best to trade shifts, stay the night, be present, but tbh there are few places less comfortable and less inviting than a hospital room, and it’s about 50/50 for family being at bedside at the moment of passing in my experience.
People who are dying and their loved ones deserve a better system. We all deserve death with dignity, medically assisted when desired, and for our loved ones to not have to bear the burden of caretaking on their own.
