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Dr. Kopp,

Since I am not a doctor, but a raw grieving widow, I do not have the energy (or the knowledge) to debate a topic fraught with so much political heat, considering the Obamacare issue.

All I can do is offer my husband’s predicament, his expressed wishes, and his personal Roman Catholic faith as it guided his choices.

He did not want a feeding tube, and did not want an IV tube. He was diagnosed as a Parkinson’s patient, but had many symptoms that did not fit that diagnosis, and for which the normal meds prescribed did nothing to help his most painful symptoms.

He had every right to choose not to go back into a modern hospital, which exacerbated his illness, and which was unable to treat his most painful symptoms.

After the third hospitalization, he begged me, and his adult children, not to subject him to that torture again, and the subsequent need for weeks of “rehab” were even harder for him, and distressed him even more.

Please consider - there is was no estate to inherit, all any of us wanted to do is to keep his final days as comfortable as possible. He was seen by the best neurologists, and neuro-psychiatric specialists in the Minneapolis area, and also spent several weeks being treated by the Mayo Clinic.

Nothing they had to offer helped to relieve his autonomic nervous system problems. Nothing they tried worked.

Hospice isn’t a panacea - Please know that I am not suggesting that.

I am surrounded with Parkinson’s patients in my “adult living” building who never have the problems my husband suffered.

But, I am so weary of explaining that Parkinson’s is a “catch-all” diagnosis of many different diseases of the brain, and is so easily attached as a label to anyone who suffers a movement disorder. Until a brain biopsy is done after death, who knows whether it was Lewy-Body, Autonomic Nervous System failure or whatever else they haven’t figured out, yet.

I am also sick and tired of dealing with doctors who try to fit patients into pigeon-hole diagnoses, and who are all to ready to pass them off to another medical center when the usual drugs don’t “work” the way they are supposed to, according to the salesmen that come around.

When I get hit by a truck, fall off the roof, slip on the ice, or get shot by someone in the ‘hood - the emergency room is my best chance.

When I get a chronic disease - I am sorry, I have no faith in modern medicine. Our recent experience suggests that hospice is a wiser choice.

Of course, that is just my opinion. Everyone else is free to consider whether the side-effects of the drugs pushed by the pharmaceutical companies are worth it, particularly when they do nothing to correct or resolve the underlying cause, but only treat the symptoms, but then cause new symptoms, needing new drugs, and so on into infinity.

You are entitled to your own opinion of the marvels of modern medicine, as I am entitled to mine. It totally failed my beloved husband, and I am bitter. He was only 72, and I wanted so many more years with this wonderful man.

I didn’t get them, but it wasn’t because of Hospice. They were the only ones who cared about his constant severe muscular pain.