Michigan

Last year, my mother was in hospice at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta. She was in extreme pain and my sister and I were begging the nurse to get a doctor to approve more morphine for her. Finally, that happened, and my mother became unconscious. Mind you, my mother, sister and I had to agree that, if necessary, my mother could be given a pain killer dose that would (basically) kill her. Again, she was in severe pain on an already high dose of morphine.

My sister and I spent the night at the hospital. My sister woke me up at 4 a.m. to tell me my mother had died. The nurse had already been in to check on her, and she was allegedly dead.

I knew my mother's biggest fear was that she would be buried alive. So I leaped up, and checked the monitor she was attached to. Her heart rate was 75! Dead folks don't have heart rates. I don't recall the numbers on the pulse oximeter, but it was working, too -- after several changes of equipment, it still worked. So we called the nurse back in, and she insisted that something must be wrong with the machine. Two different machines later, and my mom's heart was still beating. The rate was slowly going down, so I said I was going to stay right there, that I thought my mom was dying, but I had to make sure.

Twenty minutes later, she died, and she stayed dead. Considering being prematurely declared dead was my mother's greatest fear, I figured she didn't mind that (if she could hear), her last 30 minutes of life were taken up by a conversation in which my sister and I forced the nurse to prove she was actually dead. I would have rather our conversation had been different, but we had to take care of our mom and there was no way around that.

Then we had to wait a few hours before another nurse came whose job it was to officially declare people dead. Before she did, I checked to see that liver mortis had begun, and it had.

I tell you what, the one hospital my family will never go to is EUH. My sister and I now have a detailed plan to move to a state that allows assisted suicide for terminally ill patients, if we find ourselves in that situation. My mother's experience at EUH in her entire last week of life (only 32 hours in hospice care) was a travesty. And this is with my sister spending that entire time in mom's hospital room to advocate for her, and of course I was there too, but I would and did leave the room. My mother had such great insurance that there were no medical bills for cancer treatment, and that included going to MD Anderson for evaluation and treatment. So the problem wasn't because she was poor and under or uninsured. And it wasn't due to her race, or that my sister and I were rude -- because we went out of our way to be friendly, polite and appreciative. I went up the chain of command and that helped once. Once. That is a story for another day.