Posted on 06/05/2011 7:50:41 PM PDT by surroundedbyblue
Every night before closing his eyes, while lying on a hospital bed in his living room, Francis Massco pleaded to his wife of almost 60 years: "Pray that God takes me home tonight."
Three years after a diagnosis of prostate cancer, followed by costly, invasive treatments, Massco, 82, decided in February against more chemotherapy.
"I wouldn't be mad if I fell over right now," he told the Tribune-Review last month.
The one-time corporate attorney resisted a little-known tenet of medicine: Hospitals and doctors make more money by aggressively treating terminal patients than by keeping them free of pain and letting them die with dignity. Some doctors derisively call the practice "flogging" — as in, beating a dead horse.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
What a coincidence, the dessicated Leslie Stahl just discussed this very topic on "60 Minutes on CNBC."
Which is made all the more creepy because I thought 60 Minutes was on CBS.
Wow. That's how my sister described it. And my Mom was an RN too. Amazing.
Families did that for nearly all of the first 200 years of the USA.
Yes, it's a new moral challenge only faced by the last 3-4 generations with the advent of Medicare. Before Medicare families either had insurance...or money...or the family member died a "natural" death.
Heart Attack, stroke and cancer were usually fatal in the near term. Now it's possible to extend life decades beyond the initial incidence. And yes, there is a dollar cost to it and if the cost were born by families more natural human behaviors would prevail.
It is, and Lesley Stahl was busy tonight throwing Israel under the bus like her master, Barry.
Interesting is in those last few hours the stillness in her room was palatible. Hard to discribe to others. A sense you were with them between two worlds as they were preparing to leave, and He was doing whatever He does within them to make that journey.... You just know you’re among whatever activity is happening which can’t be seen... but not a part of directly. And you’re as still along with............and then.... they leave.
What I can attest to is they do not make the journey alone by any means....
You’re right
That still sends shivers up my spine.
I gguess CBS news has decided to go all in as the official news organ of the New vanguard.
Yes, the patient actually dies of dehydration.
This has happened to both my mother and my MIL. I still struggle with the ethical implications of that.
It gives me comfort that both are now with the Lord, but the dehydration of their last days troubles me.
Don't trouble the masses with facts...
When the responsible individuals or their families have NO financial stake in the care that their loved one receives, cost becomes a non-factor and decisions are altered.
Do some here really think I take joy in putting a feeding tube in a 90 y.o. who has been in a NH for the past 15 yrs due to dementia? Really?
Something else I noted was, though my mom appeared to be in a deep sleep at times, yet she would make statements out of the blue quite abruptly and out loud...as if she was talking with someone else. Like people do when they talk in their sleep.
One time she addressed me by name...as if we’d been in conversation... but we had not had conversation for some hours.
I found myself hanging on her every breath...somehow still hoping she might decide to stay . On one occassion I said..”Mom remember when I was a little girl and would come to your room late at night when I didn’t feel well and....”
I never finished the sentence... she lifted up her covers so I could come up to her bed and snuggle as I did when a child. And I did just that... Our faces just inches from one another then, A nurse came in soon after and broke into tears when she saw us embrassed... It was surely a mother and daughter moment.
I have always hoped.. other people who are ‘with’ those dying would have such tender moments. These help to take the “sting” out of death...just as He said He would do.
That's all the alphabet networks and sadly Fox is ready to join them.
My surgeon explained to me that if you give a patient water...or too much crushed ice, becuase they sometimes do ask for water, that because of the state of the body by then it can go to the lungs and they drown.
Same with my Mom. Based on what my sister heard it was almost as if Mom was talking to the other side.
Wouldn’t an IV wouldn’t do the trick...
“Which is made all the more creepy because I thought 60 Minutes was on CBS.
It is - the first run episodes, that is. A few nights a week, CNBC just recycles some of the reruns that relate (usually) to business in some aspect.
Yours is the most appropriate post in this thread.
Years gone past, when there weren’t ‘nursing homes’ and ‘medicaid’ or ‘medicare’ families actually CARED for the elderly and infirmed. Then when 90 y.o. granny who’s been demented for the past 15 yrs developed a bowel obstruction secondary to colon cancer, the family that has paid granny’s medical care and actually rotated her in bed 4 times a day to keep from the development of bedsores and cleaned the sheets from the code browns probably didn’t opt for the colon resection and chemo.
As a nurse, I’m not sure how to take your posts. Are you advocating the withholding of treatment in patients that you deem unqualified?
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