The golfer at the driving range was a regular. George likes to keep his drive going straight by hitting a bucket of balls a day.
But he is not your normal golfer. He is on the range while in hospice care.
Debunking a stereotype, George, from Edgewood, Kentucky, proves living with hospice means anything but spending the rest of your life in bed.
George’s experience is not unique. The mission of hospice is to provide specialized care for end-of-life patients and their families. More simply, hospice care supports living one’s life to the fullest with dignity regardless of how much time remains.
Patients under hospice care can enjoy their life. They continue to do daily activities. They go for walks around the neighborhood. Visit with family and friends. Go to church. They keep living their life. And, like George, hit golf balls.
Part of the mission of hospice is that the patient’s quality of life be as important as length of life. So care takes place in the patient’s home or in a home-like setting, and concentrates on making patients as free of pain and as comfortable as they want to be so they can make the most of the time that remains, according to Emily Cahill, the Hospice Outreach Liaison at St. Elizabeth Healthcare.
Hospice is not a treatment. “It is more about comfort care,” said Cahill.
And part of that care is living life as normal as possible. Research published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management found that terminally-ill patients who received hospice care lived on average 29 days longer than those who did not opt for hospice near the end of life.
Hospice enables patients and their families to create memories that would otherwise not occur. It is the quality of these final moments that can define a “good death.”
St. Elizabeth Hospice provides a variety of specialized programs for specific diagnoses that allow patients to receive the proper care. These programs include:
- HeartBeat program: focus on congestive heart failure and heart patients
- BreatheEasy program: focus on chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and lung patients,
- Remember Me program: focus on Alzheimer’s and dementia patients
