End of life care services

Each time I’ve run this race, Run As One, in previous years, I always thought of my aunt who has been battling lung cancer as a non-smoker for some years now.  After several surgeries and removal of pieces of her lung which kept the cancer in remission, it has returned this year with a vengeance, spreading into the bones, eventually making it near impossible for her to walk or even lie down as it’s spreading in her spine and knees.

As an aside, I learned that there are a lot of non-smokers who suffer with lung cancer and it seems to be higher for Asian women.  I guess it is good to know to try to keep healthy — damn those smokers and all the second-hand smoke we are forced to inhale every day. In the city, I feel like you can’t take a breath without inhaling cigarette smoke — heck it comes through our apt window nightly (no thanks to smoking neighbors)!  We have to exhaust it out and turn on the air filter to keep the baby from inhaling it all night!

We’ve been through this before — trying to comfort a loved one wrestle with the slow, painful wasting away that is cancer — with other family members but this is the first time where we are given a bit more time than a few weeks which usually results in the patient being in the hospital.  So we were asked to set up hospice care for her and we had no idea what that entailed…or how to set it up.

My bro has been doing a lot of research for hospice and palliative care in the last days as sadly, it has reached that point.  (Irritatingly enough, the primary care doc from chinatown was so inept he had no idea how to set it up as it is the PC doc’s responsibility to refer the patient. Luckily, the oncologist was able to help and he went above and beyond working this weekend to help us.)  He’s helped set one up with VNS and we also learned that some other recommended ones in the NYC region are MJHS and Calvary.

My bro found a lot of really useful links in his research to learn more so I wanted to document some of them in one place b/c the whole hospice thing was such a scary unknown to us before this.  We are in the beginnings of this journey so I’m sure we will learn more. I hope to never need to go through this again any time soon but it’s always good to be armed with information.