By DR YVONNE LUXFORD
Think ahead (hopefully a long way ahead) to your last days. How do you want to go? At home, surrounded by family, in a specialist hospice with an expert team keeping you comfortable?
If you’re anything like me, you spend half your life making plans and choices – from the type of coffee you like to kickstart your day, location of your next holiday, to where you want to live, and how you’ll save for your kids’ future. Why is it then that we leave something as important as our end of life care to chance? Are you one of the 50% of Australians who haven’t spoken to our loved ones about what we would want?
Palliative care is all about providing the best quality of life at the end of life. Of course it’s about managing physical and emotional pain and discomfort, but it’s done in a holistic way with a genuine focus on the individual. People with a terminal illness and their loved ones tell us palliative care provides them with a level of support that they simply hadn’t expected – it truly does help them to live well until the end. What worries me is that it comes as such a surprise to people that this is the type of care they can, and should, expect.
None of us want to deal with the situation faced by T, who struggled to fulfil her father’s dying wishes. Apparently unbendable hospital rules led to T’s father being transferred from a nearly empty rural Queensland hospital, where he was gently dying close to the community he loved, to a nursing home an hour’s drive away. His community priest drove to visit him but had lost the nursing home address. Despite knowing the priest well, the hospital would not divulge the nursing home details, and the priest did not arrive in time. However, T was with her father the whole time, giving both of them great comfort. But T’s grief and sense of mistreatment of her dad will take a long time to heal. Memories of the care of the dying remain with those left behind.
Top Comments
Was with my daughter and five months later with my sister when they died. My daughter died in a major metropolitan hospital. My sister in a small rural hospital. My daughter had a dignified and very peaceful passing with palliative care. My sister did not have appropriate palliative care and her passing was tortuous for her and for her family, especially her children to witness. So important that medical care for the dying is well-planned by medical staff and respectfully administered.
Such an important and neglected topic. I'm reading an amazing book on dying at the moment by Sydney science writer Bianca Nogrady - The End. Can't recommend it enough http://www.fishpond.com.au/...