Hospizbetreuung für Grandma
I’ll start by saying that my Grandma was one of the greatest people who lived, hands down. She is one of my continuing idols even though she died of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in 2016 at the age of 95. She was a philanthropist with the biggest heart, and she was just purely loving to all of us. Our younger son is named after her (his middle name is Behrends, her maiden name - she was the daughter of two German immigrants, one from Bavaria and the other from far north Schleswig-Holstein).
But I wanted to talk about our excellent experience with hospice so people have an idea of what they can do.
Grandma’s life expectancy was six months, but six weeks after her diagnosis, she started showing signs of impending death. We were lucky enough to have 24-hour caregiving with her for years leading up to her death, so the home health company we used contacted my dad to talk about hospice care. As I’d been a cancer research nurse for six years at that point, I knew the huge benefits of hospice and strongly encouraged it… then flew from Tennessee to California with my then 18-month-old son Soren the next day to take care of getting everything set up. We got in late, but hospice came the next afternoon.
It was a Friday, and because she had home health care and a nurse granddaughter in the house, they admitted her, sent for the comfort box of medications for the dying, and said they’d send a nurse on Monday. Watching her have Cheyne-Stokes breathing got me incredibly worried and I immediately bought my dad a ticket out to Los Angeles for the next morning. I pulled up morphine for the home health assistants if they needed to give her morphine (they didn’t feel comfortable and just woke me up overnight if she did) then just did my nurse thing all of Saturday and Sunday until I drove from Newport Beach to LAX for my dad, worried she’d die while I was away because some people wait to die until their family members aren’t there.
The next few days were great. I sang to Grandma, my dad read to her, and Soren played and giggled in the atrium, halls, and backyard. He marveled at the planes flying into John Wayne International in Santa Ana. I gave her medications based on her symptoms. The clergy from both the hospice and her home church came for visits. We planned her funeral according to her instructions when her pastor came by. Hospice nurses took over during the day so I could have respite.
We left on the red eye from LAX on Tuesday. It was dark outside when we left Newport Beach. My dad said his goodbyes, I made sure she was comfortable, and I leaned down to kiss her and say that I loved her so much.
According to her caregivers, the ‘I love you’ to me was the last thing she said. She stopped eating and drinking when we left and died that Friday. Her funeral was a month later because our family cremates, and we cast her ashes into the Pacific near where we cast my Grandpa’s in 1999. My dad has her tag from the crematorium on his keychain, and I have two tattoos dedicated to her while also using her wedding set as my engagement ring every day.
I can’t begin to number the services that hospice offers because I was so deep in that I didn’t see every inner working, but in thirteen years of cancer nursing, I can say that I’ve had maybe one or two complaints about hospice in my area - I can’t speak for others. We have an incredible hospice in Nashville, Alive Hospice, and I’ve never heard a complaint about them. Prepare ahead if someone has a terminal illness - there may be multiple hospices in your area with different reviews, and you want to find the best.
In my opinion, hospice is one of the greatest gifts that can be given to the dying and their families.
