It’s ten months since I lost my husband of 55 yrs and reading this brings it all back. He was taken to the hospital with trouble breathing...they had to shock him three times to bring him back but finally he came around....was placed on ventilator for a few days. He came off of it pretty good and seemed that he might surprise everyone and make it....they jokingly called him the miracle man. He progressed to where they took him out of ICU and put on cardiac floor although his heart appeared pretty good. One day spent there and I arrive one morning to find him struggling to breathe..rang for nurse..she comes running and they call in the emergency team from ICU that floats around.....anyway back to ICU...back on ventilator for couple of days. They take him off of this and determine he needs a bi-pap machine to help breathing...okay with that...no big deal. Well his kidneys start acting up so they put port in and do dialysis a few times and determine that helped with breathing etc.
All of a sudden the nurses are taking myself and family into a room and telling me that three doctors have determined that he is too weak to make it and if he does go home it would be to hospice etc...I say okay...understand. Well, then they go into this speal of perhaps I needed to take a look at his quality of life and is this what he would want (an no he hadn’t filled out any paperwork on his wishes) So we talk to his cardio doc of 13 yrs and he tells us he thinks we need to let him go now and that it would be pain free and he wouldn’t suffer....anguish time and didn’t know what to do so decided to rely on the doctors etc....so they proceeded to take him off the bi-pap and tell me they will start a morphine drip. I ask why ..he’s in no pain...they say...don’t worry this is just to make him comfortable. I tell the nurse that I’m getting family so they can talk to him and leave the room....he is alert at this time....I returned a few minutes later and he is out cold and I immediately ask what happened and the nurse says well I gave him the morphine....he never awakened...none of us had a chance to talk to him....I held his hand until the morning when he just stopped breathing....to this day I feel like I let them kill him......I’m relaying this just to let you know that we all need to have a better understanding of just what is going on with our medical care....when one has spent three weeks in ICU with the ups and downs of problems it’s very difficult to be at a place where you are fully aware of what is going on..what they are talking about and just what it all means.....sorry this is so long......................
The morphine in that case would now be contra-indicated. My dad went through the same thing. The reason for the morphine was to make the heart attacks easier to endure. When your kidneys start to fail, it causes heart attacks. Morphine cannot be properly metabolized in the kidneys-so it becomes less effective. Another type of pain killer would have made it easier. But, I learned that last week when my uncle was in his last hours.
Having been there when my Dad went through it, I can sympathize with your experience—and it is horrible.
But it shows the necessity to talk about this stuff when we are healthy and understand what we are doing. In the heat of the moment, there is so much going on that we become inundated with opinions and options. You simply cannot make make good decisions. Or at least you cannot be sure they are good decisions.
End of life conversations in forums like this are difficult because everyone is emotionally invested in their stories. And there are a lot of people to whom the medical world is a mystery. And there are a lot of people who actually think the nurses and doctors give a hoot what their accountants say.
It is also difficult because our bodies can be going along just fine—and them you have a stroke, heart attack or aggressive cancer. And you get so swept up in the processes you are just dazed.
Tell everyone you know your story. Then tell them to talk to their families about what they want when the time comes.
If you (not YOU, but the generic public) are not willing to face your mortality, someone else is going to make that call for you.
And, as far as hospice goes— go through a Catholic hospice and you will be sure that their palliative care is in alignment with the Catholic church’s guidance.
The morphine in that case would now be contra-indicated. My dad went through the same thing. The reason for the morphine was to make the heart attacks easier to endure. When your kidneys start to fail, it causes heart attacks. Morphine cannot be properly metabolized in the kidneys-so it becomes less effective. Another type of pain killer would have made it easier. But, I learned that last week when my uncle was in his last hours.
Having been there when my Dad went through it, I can sympathize with your experience—and it is horrible.
But it shows the necessity to talk about this stuff when we are healthy and understand what we are doing. In the heat of the moment, there is so much going on that we become inundated with opinions and options. You simply cannot make make good decisions. Or at least you cannot be sure they are good decisions.
End of life conversations in forums like this are difficult because everyone is emotionally invested in their stories. And there are a lot of people to whom the medical world is a mystery. And there are a lot of people who actually think the nurses and doctors give a hoot what their accountants say.
It is also difficult because our bodies can be going along just fine—and them you have a stroke, heart attack or aggressive cancer. And you get so swept up in the processes you are just dazed.
Tell everyone you know your story. Then tell them to talk to their families about what they want when the time comes.
If you (not YOU, but the generic public) are not willing to face your mortality, someone else is going to make that call for you.
And, as far as hospice goes— go through a Catholic hospice and you will be sure that their palliative care is in alignment with the Catholic church’s guidance.
I have had a number of people tell me that their family member was put to sleep with morphine in the same sort of scenerio and the family member feels terribly guilty and bad. Nurses tend to like to put patients to sleep. I would never leave an older person alone with a nurse. Always have family or private care nurse there.
There is no reason to put an unconscious person on morphine except to hasten death.