ThatGuyNurse

“A Common Hospice Experience:
Tuesday afternoon.  My hospice social work partner and I head out of town to a rural nursing home to do an admission assessment.  We arrive and find that our patient is already in the process of active dying.  She is unresponsive.  Her legs are mottled.  Her forehead is burning with fever and her hands and feet are icy cold.  We hear the death rattles in her lungs which have filled with fluid.
We proceed to do our assessment and fill in the necessary paperwork to accomplish admission to hospice.  All the while we are doing this, we glance at each other and shake our heads over the thought that had we been called weeks or even months before so much suffering for both our patient and for her family could have been averted.  However, the family had kept holding out hope that her situation might improve.  It was only when it was completely clear that death was close was hospice called.
We finished our work, packed up and headed back to the car.  A voice called, “Nurse, come back.”  We returned.  Our patient was dead.  I then did the last work of hospice.  I prepared the body to be delivered to the funeral home.  l called her doctor to pronounced the death.  I called the coroner.  I inventoried her medications to return them to the hospice offices for disposal.   I gave what consolation I could to her family.
We left.”

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