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Hospice nurse. It depends on the situation, but morphine not only helps with pain, it also helps with respiratory distress. It helps w/ patients not feeling like they are starved for oxygen. Also, morphine is readily available in liquid form that can be absorbed under the tongue so that you don't have to use an IV and can be given at home w/out a med pump.

I am also a hospice nurse. I had a guy that was up walking around the night before (I am a night nurse). He was very sick (cancer ridden) and he was terminal. He was "well" enough to be discharged to home. He was walking himself back and forth to the bathroom that night and everything. About half way through my shift he tells me that he is tired of fighting and that tonight was his last night. He said that he would die in the morning.

Now this guys blood pressure, pulse, all his vitals were perfectly fine. When AM shift rolled in they got his vitals and they were still good. He was dead 3 hours later. He just laid down and didn't get back up and died very quickly. No seizing, no struggling, nothing. Was one of the creepiest deaths I have seen/heard of.

There are some tics that are not as obvious and aren't diagnosed. A family member had a "head bob, chin jerk" tic that was barely noticeable when he was a kid. Never got reported to the doctor. A family friend that knew someone with touretts told the parents to have a doctor check him.

If the friend wouldn't have pointed this out it wouldn't have gotten diagnosed until he was in college. His tics didn't start becoming more visible until then.

*edit He had the tic for a couple of years until he was diagnosed at 11yrs old.

My kids were four and five when my grandfather passed. He was also home with hospice at the time. My four year old remembers nothing about that time and my five year old can remember the emotions the most. I would let them in the room to talk to their gg whenever they wanted. When it got to the point that he couldn't talk back (unresponsive) both of my kids still wanted to talk with him. I explained that he could still hear them ( as a nurse we tell all the family members this, and I firmly believe it). As kids they would talk and talk.

When it got close to the end in the final hours, I had a family friend take them to her house. The last few minutes/hour can be very rough. GG would take a breath and then stop breathing for a minute or so, everyone would think he was gone and then he would take an other breath. It was very emotional for everyone there and I assumed it would have been harder on my kids.

After GG died but before they removed him from our house, I had the kids come back home. I explained that GG went to heaven and he is no longer in pain and that his body was still here but GG was no longer inside. I gave the option to the kids about going in to see him and they both wanted too. The asked a lot of questions, that I answered as best I could. Neither of them were over emotional and I think I did what was best for my kids.

As a palliative care RN in a hospital I might have a little bit more information. When I hear that a doctor has consulted palliative medicine I want that patient on my floor. We actually have a unit for palliative patients. The reason for this is because pain and discomfort are usually not being met. It's not the other units fault. They are taught that if a vital sign is this (ie low, or fast etc) that they don't give certain meds. So a person that is breathing +40 times a minute w/ a heart rate of 35, they wouldn't give the morphine that is ordered.

Up on palliative care we are taught to treat the symptoms, not the numbers. If my patient is distressed and breathing that quickly I am going to give that morphine. That patient is struggling to breathe, is in distress and is suffering. Our goal is to make sure that patient is comfortable.

*edit What I think can be done to fix this problem is that each hospital should have a palliative care unit w/ nurses and staff that are used to comfort and understand the dying process. It is better for the patient and the family.