Summer of 2019 really sucks!!! Last week dad was in the hospital all week and he was finally released on Thursday, because there is nothing that doctors can do and he is now on Hospice. Before 2019 I did not even know what the word hospice means. But I am learning really quickly about this service and what it is offering.
So what is hospice anyway ???
From the definition above, it is basically care for the terminally ill. This means that the doctor has given up and comfort care is the only thing that they will do while the patient is on hospice. In the US, there are multiple type of hospice, in patient hospice, adult home hospice, and home hospice. Now by no means am I an expert on all of this, I am just simply documenting my experiences and what I have learned this week.
In patient hospice, means the person is staying in a hospital like environment, and the focus is on comfort and not curing the cause any longer. The social work told me it was close to $400 a day for this service.
Adult home hospice, it is like in patient hospice except it is in an adult home with multiple other patients with care takers there. Some will have nurses. This is less expensive than in patient hospice, but may still cost over 10K a month.
Final option is home hospice. This option is fully covered by Medicare. In fact, MediCare provides all the necessary equipments, including hospital beds, meds for comfort, etc. Since it is home hospice, the hospice service, also provide a 24/7 hotline with nurses on call, you also get a social worker, chaplain (which I don’t know what they do), and a nurse.
It is really tough seeing my father in the condition that he is in. I still can’t believe how quickly we are at this stage, when only one month ago he was on an Alaska cruise and everything was good OK.
Sometimes, I feel that I am grabbing for straws and hopes. I am a straight and narrow type of guy, I never in my life thought I would ever walk in to a pot shop and yet last week, i walked into a pot shop and bought some CBDs for my father.