HEALTH - Life Support Patients, When to Give Up

This story has a personal connection to me, my family.  My sister died in 2007 of cancer.  She consulted all her doctors and family (Kaiser HMO) and made the decision to NOT be treated and go for hospice care.  Why?  She was in her early 80s and the treatments would have had her in the hospital most of the time and the prognosis was for additional 6mths, IF the treatments didn't kill her first.  She wanted to spend as much time as she could visiting family and places she had a connection to.

"When to let go?  Families of patients on life support face painful choice" PBS NewsHour 9/30/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  We have partnered with Inewsource, a San Diego-based journalism nonprofit, to take us inside special nursing home units where thousands of people live on life support.  The state spends millions of dollars on this type of care designed to preserve life at all costs.  Families often have high hopes for their loved ones to recover, but few ever will.

Inewsource reporter Joanne Faryon reports on the impossible choice facing those families, when to let go.

STEVE SIMMONS:  Your husband.  Your husband.  You know me.  You know me.

JOANNE FARYON, Inewsource:  Steve Simmons spends most evenings by his wife’s bedside.

STEVE SIMMONS:  Does that hurt?  Does that hurt your ear?

JOANNE FARYON:  Rafaela Simmons is severely brain injured.

STEVE SIMMONS:  Squeeze my hand.  Squeeze my hand if you love me.

JOANNE FARYON:  She has a feeding tube in her abdomen, a tracheotomy tube in her throat.  She is unable to walk or talk or respond to the world around her.

STEVE SIMMONS:  Squeeze my hand.  Squeeze my hand.

JOANNE FARYON:  She has lived in this nursing home for the past four years.

STEVE SIMMONS:  You can do it.  Squeeze my hand.

JOANNE FARYON:  Rafaela is one of the 4,000 people living in units like this in California.  On the books, they’re called subacute units, but among some doctors, they’re known as vent farms, because so many of the people who live here need ventilators just to breathe.

The average age of these residents is 56.  But there are units devoted just to children.  They’re the end of the line, the place people go once medicine has saved them, but where there is little hope for recovery.

Ed Kirkpatrick is the director of the Villa Coronado Nursing Home in San Diego County.

ED KIRKPATRICK, Director, Villa Coronado Nursing Home:  The drive in the system is to be able to repair and fix anything.  And that’s a good thing.  That’s a good thing.  We want that to happen.  At what point, though, does it become futile?