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To: Brian Kopp DPM

In fact, after spoon feeding becomes unworkable, I have found from personal experience that by using a large, wide mouth straw, like the ones you can’t get with giant refillable soft drinks in New York anymore, voluntary feeding can continue with an Alzheimer’s patient for as much as an additional year. (Our hospice folks learned a few things from us.)

As a caregiver to my step mom, I would suck her food into the wide straw, then offer her the straw (bottom end), holding it up a bit so that she did not have to fight gravity to suck some in.

My dad and I used a patient lift to get her down to large Lazy Boy recliner with a couple layers of 3” memory foam mattress topper on top of it, in our family room each day.

That memory foam is great stuff and goes a long way towards preventing bed sore problems. We sewed a sheet cover to fit over the two layers of memory foam that we cut to fit the recliner. (and an “accident pad” on top of that to prevent soiling.)

The recliner allowed us to easily position her for eating, resting or sitting up with us all day. We would move her back to the hospital bed (with a similar memory foam set-up) next to dad’s bed for the night.

We managed to keep her comfortable and smiling to the end, which was, of course, our mission.


11 posted on 07/11/2013 12:44:59 PM PDT by EasySt (Time to build that gulch...)
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To: EasySt; gdani; Nifster; wagglebee; little jeremiah; narses; NYer; Jim Robinson
God bless you.

I can't believe FReepers on this thread are actually advocating euthanizing this woman. Food and water are basic human rights, not medical interventions that can be withdrawn at whim. Withholding food and water from a patient able to eat from a spoon is homicide. Feeding someone is not a "life-saving measure." Its simple human decency.

No health care worker or facility has any obligation under traditional Judeo-Christian medical ethics to assist a patient in suicide.

To claim otherwise illustrates once more the real dangers of radical libertarianism.

We better all wake up to this active euthanasia or soon we too are going to be coerced into a duty to die under ObamaCare rationing of care.

12 posted on 07/11/2013 1:02:09 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM
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To: EasySt

You and your Dad are good people. :)


28 posted on 07/11/2013 3:51:50 PM PDT by Politicalmom (Liberalism. Ideas so great they have to be mandatory.-FReeper Osage Orange)
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