My neighbor had a husband who was married before, and was estranged from his children from that first marriage. He was diagnosed with emphysema..
He did have emphysema, but as soon as my neighbor would leave for work, her ill husband somehow found the strength to leave his sick bed, and walk around the backyard drinking beer.. all day long..
He’d get drunk, and retire to his sick bed before she returned home at 4pm..He also took meds (benzos), so he’d be totally wasted by the time she got home..
She would tell me how ill he was, and how he could barely walk, and was so weak, and ill..
“His eyes are glassy. His speech is slurred. I think this could be it. He’s dying.”
I would say, “He’s not dying. He’s higher than a kite. He’s been drinking and doing drugs all day.”
Basically he was a benzo’d up drunk who was trying to reconnect with his children by feigning his soon to be dead and gone act.
He even went so far as to get Hospice involved..Apparently, the government will pay hospice for a period of time, plus one extension if you don’t croak on time.
I told my neighbor that her husband would go in the backyard every morning when she left for work, and that some of his symptoms of “croakousity” were being on beer all day with benzo’s, and then later on benzo’s and oxcontin..
On the last day of his second government funded hospice extension, She was given morphine to administer to him by eyedropper on his tongue for his pain (that he really wasn’t in)..
At first, half hours apart, then fifteen minutes apart..He received his last drops of morphine at 11:15pm, after several hours of begging her to stop the morphine, that he had been faking the severity of his emphysema to reconcile with his kids, and he didn’t want to die...
She heard that plea, but continued the morphine She said Hospice had told him to give him all the morphine, even if he asked her to stop.
She said his breathing became slower, and his respirations shallower as the hours passed..I tried to explain that morphine is a CNS depressant, so yes, it will cause you to breathe, and everything else more slowly, and finally stop breathing.
At 11:45 pm.. He died.. right on schedule.. fifteen minutes before the government funding for hospice ran out..Sometimes being a manipulative old drunk has a high cost.
Wow. God have Mercy.
You have been misinformed by someone. Hospice has no deadline, only requalification points. If a patient is still terminal at the qualification date, hospice care continues.