SSM Health Good Samaritan Hospital - Mt. Vernon issued the following announcement on Nov. 2.
The last few of months of the year represent many meaningful moments for a vast majority of us. From pictures of costumed children that chronicle the early years and gathering for Thanksgiving meals and football games, to holiday gatherings centered around many of our richest faiths and family traditions. That's why, having dedicated nearly 20 years of my life to hospice care, I have always appreciated that National Hospice and Palliative Care Month is commemorated in November. The care that hospice focuses on resonates with those strong themes of love, faith, memory-making, and family bonds. This year's theme is “My Hospice: A program that works. A benefit that matters.”
This year, I have three loved ones receiving hospice care. The specific care is shaped by their unique, personal set of choices, values and goals. One sought maximum care, visits, and support from across all of the hospice disciplines, enabling him to stay at home with his caregiver, even though they are both advanced in age. In a number of ways he has flourished more than he had in the two years prior to hospice. His caregiver has been strongly supported in the ways she needed and desired.
The second is a family member, who tapped hospice services to help her transition from aggressive treatment, which was consuming all her time and energy with minimal benefit, to focus instead on completing key life tasks and goals that would help prepare her family to celebrate her life, rather than live in futile frustration during their last chapter together.
A third is relying on only a select number of hospice services, with minimal visits at this time. This grants her confidence and peace of mind, knowing that an informed, caring and professional response is available 24/7 for symptom management – even when demand increases as her disease progresses. This frees her to radically redefine her personal life and spend her remaining time and energy revealing more than ever about her heart and spirit.
You, the patient and caregiver, are in the driver's seat. It's your life. It's your hospice care experience, not ours.
Hospice works because it is designed to shape itself around what you – the patient and family – hope for and need to experience as healing in your last chapter together. I use the word “healing” intentionally, as so many experience life and relationship healings without the promise of a cure, when that curative pursuit takes away so much more than it can yield to life, especially when that time and energy is so limited.
I remember how hospice worked for a father of two sons with whom he had no contact for nearly 15 years, despite living within 20 miles. Addiction had left a deep divide between them. He voiced that a key goal of his while on hospice was to reconnect with them. Through the help of hospice’s support services, patient letters initially ignored were eventually responded to. Then cautious phone conversations came about. These were followed by the first meeting of his only grandchild and an introduction to his youngest son's fiancé. Two weeks before the patient died came his last, and best-ever Father's Day. His eldest son was shaving his father at home and calling him “dad,” something he felt would have never happened before hospice came along.
Hospice worked for them. If he had been drained by futile, aggressive care and harried trips to and from treatment centers with the lingering, debilitating side effects, would any of this have happened? Who knows for sure. But it did happen with hospice care that works.
Hospice does matter because you matter. Don’t allow the myths and misconceptions about hospice care keep you from making the informed decisions for your own life or the life of a loved one. Ask questions of knowledgeable, caring professionals. Choose hospice or don't choose hospice, but please do not live someone else's opinions, choices or values. It ultimately matters that you genuinely live your best life, from beginning to end.
SSM Health provides compassionate and quality care when a patient has a terminal illness. Our team understands the special skills needed to care for people with a limited life expectancy and to provide comfort and guidance to caregivers, family and friends. SSM Health at Home Hospice emphasizes preserving dignity and improving quality of life through symptom management — which includes relief from emotional, spiritual and physical pain. Learn more.
Learn more about hospice and palliative care with these resources from the Catholic Health Association of the United States.
Original source can be found here.
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