Morphine is for PAIN CONTROL, and when a person is dying, it is the best drug to give for a number of reasons, ask your surgeon family member. We are not talking about people who have a chance of full recovery and quality of life, we are talking HOSPICE. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PALLIATIVE AND HOSPICE HEALTH CARE BEFORE YOU POST.
SO much disinfo here, and it breaks my heart. I became a nurse for this?? So people could hate me for wanting to help people be well? When I first started 20 years ago, health care was NOT the corporate monster it is now, it was not "litigative" health care, it was not the hard on for insurance companies. You have NO IDEA how freakin' hard it is to BE in this field now, when your only intention was to HEAL and be there for people who are HURTING.
Im over it now. Been thinking a long time about getting out of it, for many of the reasons people here on GLP believe our health system sucks. But I'm tired of people like in this thread thinking I could be some kind of MURDERER.
REALLY SUCKS. But I'd go to Japan in a MINUTE if they would let me. THAT"S the soul of a REAL doctor or nurse....and all the other techs, too. Some of us-actually gave a shit.
Threads like this-why I just don't want to anymore.
My father is a retired orthopedic surgeon. I cannot remember it being appropriate to give morphine for hip pain before or after surgery. Period.
Check into that.
If morphine is not normally prescribed in a hospital setting to 65-year-olds with orthopedic pain (bone or joint related pain), you have a GOOD reason to doubt the true motivations of your brother and the hospice care workers.
It seems as though the hospice care workers have asked your brother the all important in question, "Who is in charge here (i.e. your mother or him)?" and he has answered that he is the one in charge.
Then, the hospice workers would have asked a series of questions with which they ascertain if his desire is to have your mother get better or slide into an earlier death by what they will describe as compassionate means (i.e. higher and higher doses of morphine every few days).
Your brother has undoubtedly asked for plan B (morphine prompted lack of respiration in the end) and the hospice workers are weakening your mother to prevent her from fighting for her own life by guaranteeing a continually dimishing physical condition (less muscle tissue to fight back with and less clarity of thought with each passing day).
Dpes your mother have a will?
Did she ever designate you or your brother or anyone else in charge of her medical decisions and/or financial affairs in a legal dicument in the past?
If so, and she designated him to look out for her best interests she has made a mistake. If she designated you, kick him out of all of her affairs TODAY and change the locks.
If she never designated either of you nor anyone else, you should be able to get some sort of a restraining order that would STOP the palliative care medical approach until you can have her guardianship decided between you and your brother (or the state) by a judge in family court.
If you do nothing, your mother will be helped to die with the morphine.
This is done routinely in every hospice center in America to my knowledge and I have three cases that I have known of personally that the deaths happened in this way (morphine overdose).
It is done in this country as a rule, but it is never discussed or admitted to openly to the nonmedical public.
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 919411