Patients must be the first priority
He Zhu, the main subject of my story and the person who suggested that I should write about hospice treatment, was my extracurricular English teacher at high school.
I was touched by her calm words and logical description of her mother’s final days and death in a hospice care ward when we spoke in August, just a few days after the funeral.
It was the first time I had heard details of end-of-life care because none of the seniors I know had experienced this approach.
A month later, my grandfather died in the emergency ward of a Beijing hospital after a long illness.
He was on a ventilator until his very last moments. Despite the mortuary makeup, his nose and face were still a little misshapen after wearing a face mask for several months.
I felt deeply sorry; not for losing him at the decent age of 93, but for his suffering in the final months, the absence of farewells from myself and other family members, and for his slightly changed appearance at the funeral.
Though my father had done his best and had nothing to regret, when we discussed He’s case he said he would consider hospice care if a similar situation arose in our family.
Neither he nor his siblings was aware of the availability of hospice care at the end of life, or what a decent farewell could have meant to them before their father died.
“To cure sometimes; To relieve often; To comfort always”.
Those are the words of Edward Livingston Trudeau, a physician in the United States, who was a tuberculosis patient in the late 19th century, before the advent of drugs to combat the condition.
Incredible advances have been made by medical science in the past 100 years, and modern medicines have defeated tuberculosis and even certain forms of cancer.
Despite those improvements, we have to admit that there are no guaranteed cures for many illnesses — for example, COVID-19 — while disease and death are inevitable parts of life that cannot be solved simply by medical ingenuity and techniques.
As Zhang Wei, a hospice care volunteer at Haidian Hospital, told me, “For patients with a terminal illness, it’s not life we are prolonging; sometimes it’s their pain and the process of dying.”
If that’s the case, the priority should be to care for patients’ emotional and spiritual needs.
Rather than providing excessive, ultimately fruitless treatment, hospice medics are expected to alleviate the patient’s pain, improve their quality of life, help them realize their last wishes with regard to relatives and die with dignity.
Death is not a common topic among younger people, such as my generation, but I thought about it seriously when writing this story.
I hope I can approach death naturally and quietly at home or in a cozy ward with loved ones around me so I can experience the dignity of peace amid pain and death.