I would never put anyone I loved in a hospice.
My husband's hospice care was at home. He wanted to die at home. I am a retired nurse, I had the help of family and hospice, and I am so grateful for everything they did.
Then you have no idea what hospice is...you could never say that if you did. Have you ever been with someone during their end of life?
Carolyn
I hope you are never faced with the necessity of considering hospice. I can only tell you that it was a wonderful facility that made the process as peaceful and painless as possible for my mother. I know that she is experiencing an eternity with Christ and I look forward to seeing her someday.
I don’t think death is the worse thing that can happen to an individual who knows the Savior.
We helped my father fight off hospice to his final day. The surgeons messed up his surgery, the doctors didn’t want to become involved, and they all tried to throw him away into hospice. We fought and fought them for months. Dad was pleading with them all to try a treatment. Finally, we found doctors willing to treat him, and the hospital’s ethics committee tried to stop them. After all the fighting, they gave him one treatment, but, by then, it was too late. The cancer was too far gone. He fought like a warrior to his last moment.
“I would never put anyone I loved in a hospice.”
It sounds as though you had a bad experience. That is unfortunate, as well as, in my experience the exception to the rule.
I have patient’s who die in hospice fairly often: I of course cannot recount their testimony, but almost universally, their families found he experienced to be a godsend when the alternative is considered.
Hospices are as different as individual doctors are. Some hospice maangers are in it because they love death, others are in it because they love the living.
For example, my wife was impressed and inspired by her hospice rotation, but then we have folks like the hospice management in Pinellas Park, Florida who let a woman die of thirst when she shouldn't have been in hospice at all...nuff said!
We had my father on a home-hospice program with CNA's coming in our front door early every morning to give him a sponge-bath and shave and change his linens. They made sure he got pain management very promptly when he needed it, advised us on feeding and other comfort care --- they even arranged to have his earwax cleared out by a visiting medic so he could appreciate his favorite CD's.
Without them, it's hard to see how we could have kept him home in his period of long decline (he actually received home hospice services for 27 months.) Those gals loved ol' Edward and treated him as they would have treated their own fathers. Four of them came to his funeral Mass and prayed and wept with us when he died.