[LoveUSA]

I had two aunts who were victims of attempted euthanasia by private nursing homes in PA. The nursing home stopped feeding my eldest aunt until my mother stepped in and raised holy h*ll. The other one had the "flu" and the nursing home said she couldn't keep food down so they stopped feeding her. Thank God my mother and I visited her that weekend. When we saw that my aunt was too weak to talk to us, we called her son in MN so he could exercise his authority. Once they starting administering small amounts of Ensure to my aunt she recovered quickly and lived for several years after.

My father was killed by the local hospital when the staff rolled him on his side to perform a colonoscopy. He had had abdominal surgery and was retaining fluids like a burn victim which caused his entire body to swell up. The hospital thought they should go in and scope out the problem. He died immediately of a heart attack. I have heard that this is how nursing homes "hurry patients along"...they roll them on their left side to overstress the heart.

Sucks.

[Yet_Again]

My sympathy on your loss. My father passed away years ago - it was expected - but it’s never easy. As far as I know, there’s no science that would support the “rolling left will over stress the heart idea” - unless the patient was so intolerant of preload that he was that close to passing on already. Rolling pregnant patients is commonly done to prevent compression of the IVC by the gravid uterus. I suppose something similar might happen in a patient with an abdominal compartment syndrome or something of the sort but still it would be exceedingly rare (something that would go into a medical journal I’d imagine).

For those of you who have had good experiences with hospice, count your blessings.