One of the most riveting topics in life is the process of dying. For my project, I decided to focus on the death of terminally ill patients and how they and their loved ones process losing a loved one. The dominant social practice concerning the passing away of someone who has no chance of survival is to get admitted to a hospital and spend the rest of their life connected to machines that will prolong their life by a few months. This type of care is called Hospice. Most hospice care focuses on physical, emotional, and spiritual symptoms a terminally ill patient goes through. There are two kinds of hospice care that I explore in this project; in-hospital hospice or at-home-hospice.
In class reading materials such as the article called, “The Way We Die Now” helped me understand how simple the decision between in-hospital hospice and at-home-hospice really is. “…about $67 billion – nearly a third of the money spent by Medicare – goes to patients in the last two years of life.” Instead of preventing illnesses, the government/insurance companies choose to spend money to ease the suffering from those illnesses. The money that is being spent on helping terminally ill patients die could be spent to try and stop from those patients from ever being fatal. In-hospital hospice is not just a financial problem, it also affects people’s morals. “… both she and my father let go that part of their lives and they could not control and instead began to focus on what they could control: the joys and blessings of their marriage.” The elderly couple that is the focus of the article chose to live the remainder of the time they had “surrounded by those they loved.” Some of the insights that I gained from this reading was: If granny wants to die at home so why waste more money by keeping her in the hospital attached to machines?
For the real world exploration part of this project, I decided to interview an acquaintance whose grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and after months of chemotherapy, she finally decided to give up “on the useless exposure to radiation and constant visits to the oncologist that ended in nothing but tears.” My acquaintance that actually chose to be anonymous confessed that he was truly broken by his grandmother’s slow death. I don’t know the interviewee very well but I do know that he is someone who likes to have a tough guy image. And for him to confess that he was upset and disturbed by seeing his grandmother suffer through the chemo was somewhat shocking. He did not want to comment on how the rest of his family might have felt at that time because “I(him) don’t want to give you (me) speculative information.” But I think the true reason for his secretive nature was that he was a little ashamed because his father is a doctor as well. He is not an oncologist but he worked in the same hospital and I can imagine how disappointed and ashamed his father must have been seeing his own mother suffer at the place where he is employed to make people better. After his grandmother had decided to accept hospice care (on their own expenses), she had around a month to settle all her affairs and finally die surrounded by people that loved her.
