Waiting to Die

I was sitting in my cubicle today thinking about the patients our pharmacy provides medicine for. We take care of the drug orders for long term care and hospice patients, so it is a common thing to have a few of our people to die each day. There is a big difference in the way doctors give out medicine to someone in hospice care verses someone else.

In regular care the doctor's goal is to help prevent or cure diseases, or at least treat it so the person has a high quality of life. In hospice care the disease has already won, death is coming it's just a matter of when. In hospice care the doctors will write prescriptions for doses of pain medicine that would damage a normal person liver, but when you and your liver are going to be dead in 6 months no matter what it matters little. The goal becomes to keep a person as comfortable as possible until they die.

It made me think about how most of us live by hospice rules. We are just trying to keep ourselves as comfortable as possible while we wait to die. This means avoiding pain at all costs while seeking after whatever takes our minds off the discomfort for a little while. For most people this leads to seeking after money and things, and just like narcotic pain killers, you always need more in bigger doses to keep comfortable.

I think I have more to say about this, but it'll have to wait for now.