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I just watched my Mother-in-law die under hospice care a couple of months ago. It did make me feel uncomfortable to see her drugged up to the point where she couldn’t communicate with her family. Of course, being drugged up is the name of control of more than half of the patients in a nursing home. I honestly think my Mother-in-law was thoroughly addicted to pain medications—fentanyl, then other opiates. Yes, they die in a stuperous, pain-free state, but is it right?

First of all, let me say that I’m sorry for you and your family’s loss. It is never easy under any circumstances. I’ve been there with my MIL and both my parents and other family members.

But then let me ask you a few honest questions. If your MIL was in excruciating and constant pain, would she have been at any point of having meaningfully communication with you? And was she in a nursing home or a hospice care facility? They are two very different things. I do not BTW have a very good opinion of most nursing homes from what I’ve observed. My experiences with those I’ve know in Catholic hospice care, both in a facility and with in home care, is vastly different than what I observed in commercial “nursing homes”.

As far as being “addicted” to pain meds, if a person is in their final days and hours of life, what difference does that really make if they are addicted? It’s not as if a dying person in their very last days or hours of their life is going to suddenly get up out of their bed and hold up a pharmacy looking for drugs or hold you up at the ATM looking for cash to support their “drug” habit. The sad thing is that many people in chronic and debilitating pain are now being denied medication out of fear of addiction. While some people who are addicts and not in need of pain relief, their abuse of the system means that many who are in need of such meds are treated like addicts whether they are or aren’t.

Yes, they die in a stuperous, pain-free state, but is it right?

So what is the alternative? Withhold all pain meds from the terminally ill and dying? Would you really want that for someone you care about?

I don't have the answers and I know a fair bit about medicine. My MIL was addicted to Vicodin at least a dozen years before she entered the nursing home at 89. Most of the occupants were walking pharmacopoeias with some taking a dozen drugs. The overmedication is a modern event. Nursing homes only came into existence in the last 60 years or so.

Unless one has experienced a loved one go through a very painful terminal illness, one really isn’t making an informed judgement. It might be easy to say don’t drug someone up until one sees their mom or dad writhing and screaming in pain that has no other hope, short of death, of ending. Pain can be so bad it makes one desire death. What do you do when a loved one is in so much pain they are beyond even that?