Dear Judy,
I need help with my mother. She has been diagnosed with stomach cancer five days ago in a hospital here in Los Angeles. She is still in the hospital because they cannot release her unless someone can care for her.
I don’t have the ability to give her proper care (I work full time). Is there an agency I can contact? We don’t have medical insurance. There is only a little time left for her to live, the doctor said. But I am praying to God that there will be a little more time.
Please help!
Lucia
Dear Lucia,
Here’s what to do first: Contact, if you haven’t yet done so, the hospital’s social worker. There is one. Tell her to give you the names of at least 3 hospices in the Los Angeles area.
Hospices, as you probably know, provide nurses, doctors and volunteers to help care for patients who are terminally ill — and Medicare (ie. the federal government) picks up most of the bill for both care and medications.
Then get in touch with the hospices, and see which one provides nurses and volunteers who live nearest your mother’s home. Your mother will either be cared for in her own home. Or if she needs difficult pain managment or other forms of help that can’t be provided in her own home, she may be sent to the hospice’s in-patient unit, where you can visit her.
Please do this as soon as possible. This way your mother will get the medical and emotional care she needs right up to the very end at almost no cost to her or your family.
And let me know, once you’ve managed to contact a good hospice, how things are going.
Thank you for writing
Judy
Shouldn’t a decent hospital social worker seek out people like Lucia and her mother, who obviously don’t know their way around the system, rather than wait to be approached? What if Lucia hadn’t written to you?
That woman’s situation is another example of why we need a national health insurance system which provides coverage for everyone.
She needs help quickly, and our current system just doesn’t provide it to a hard-working, upright individual facing a catastrophic family crisis.
In answer to Jane — shouldn’t a good social worker seek out people like Lucia’s mother, a desperate patient with a terminal illness? — the answer is, Yes.
Of course.
But hospitals are often messy places, suffering staff shortages and, all too often, overwhelmed, overworked medical personnel who may grow callous and indifferent as the years roll by.
In answer to Frank, who points out that we need a national health insurance system that provides universal coverage, the answer is:
Yes.
I agree with you completely.
But that national system has to be carefully designed and implemented. Creating a national system doesn’t ensure compassionate care for patients with terminal illnesses and their families.
That issue, like so much else, needs to be worked out.
Judy, you are so right on this one. Even the best “national system” will not help physicians and medical staff talk to patients and families about terminal illness. It is hard stuff, it is uncomfortable, it takes alot of time.
Some hospitals have palliative “teams” (meaning comfort care). Seek those folks out, they get it and they know how to talk (or really how to listen), to patients and their family.
To Lucinda: simply state, ” my goal is for my Mom to go home and be comfortable, help me set up the resources necessary to do this.” Keep asking, don’t give up. Blessings to you.