My prayer for today

I am working with a family today that can't decide if dad should be put on hospice or not. In the end they do not trust the person that first approached them about putting him on hospice. (They had good reason not to trust her, but that's a whole other story.)

Their concern is that they don't want to abuse the system. While that is a worthy concern, the reality of hospice is that the family can rarely make the determination either from a lack of knowledge or an inability to deal with reality. I posted recently on the fact that I believe people like hospice workers because we are the experts at the one thing that nobody wants to be an expert at, and that fact means that our patients and their families need to be able to trust us. This family doesn't trust anyone, because an unethical good for nothing company/person tried to railroad them into hospice without being honest with them. That is unfortunate, and really makes me mad.

This post that I found this morning is one of a thousand examples that I could give you of how hard this whole process is on families. The amount of peace that a family (and patient) can find by bringing in people they can trust is one of the biggest reasons I fell in love with my job. The fact that some people ruin that opportunity is one of my biggest frustrations with the whole medical community.

My thoughts and prayers today are with all of the families that are struggling with huge decisions about the care of their loved ones. To be honest, I can only try to guess how hard it would be to admit a loved one to hospice. I pray today that those who need the help will find it, and that those entrusted with such a huge task will take that responsibility very seriously.