Family Guidance In The Final Hours and After…
In the hours to minutes before death, gather family and significant others. Encourage each person to spend some time alone with the person dying. This is the time to talk...
Something to Think About: a blog on end of life
Rushing Your Hospice Nurses Benefits No One
Families are stressed and frightened and by the time they finally reach out for hospice services, they have already wanted and needed them for days if not weeks.
Supporting a Hospice Patient During Their Life Review
As end of life approaches, people start looking at their life; what they’ve accomplished, not done, who they have touched, interacted with, and the relationships they have or have not built...
I Believe Hospice is About Healing, Building Trust and Educating
All the hours of talking, drinking coffee, and eating homemade pies was time spent healing, building trust, and educating. It wasn’t about blood pressures. It was about people, feelings, and...
Caregivers Carry The Burden
My hope in writing this blog is to draw our attention to the “unsung heroes” caring for their special person as end of life approaches, as well as to those caring...
Don’t Let A Special Opportunity Get Lost
I believe everyone has the right to be told once that they can’t be fixed. It is the physician’s job to compassionately and honestly give that information...
Enter The World of the Person With Dementia
I had someone ask me "Why do all people with dementia feel someone is out to get them?" My answer—not all people with dementia feel or react like someone is...
Dying Is Not Pretty
People don’t die like they do in the movies. Mom is not going not going to say some profound words, close her eyes and be dead...
Restoring Heart to Hospice: Crafting a Compassionate Orientation
Taking care of someone who is at the end of life is different from taking care of someone who is going to get better, BUT most people don’t know this—-including...
Grieving is Loneliness and Aloneness
I think a big part of grieving is loneliness. Loneliness for our person who has left us but also aloneness in our day to day activities...
How Are You Spending This Gift of Life?
The space between birth and death is the most important part of life YET we somehow go through the living part unaware. In a hurry, with a great deal of tension, and very little...
Denial of a Life Limiting Illness
Denial by the person with a life threatening illness, denial by the caregiver, and I’ll even add denial by some attending physicians. Denial is often the reaction to diseases that have...