Sorry, I Don’t Recognize Your Name

Here I sit at the end of hospice IDT (interdisciplinary team) meeting with a sense of sadness. I feel compelled to write this entry. We have just reviewed and had a quiet moment for all the patients that have died in the last week. The list is long as usual but what saddens me the most is there are names on this list that I’ve never heard before. To be the Medical Director of a hospice and to not recognize a name is a tragedy. If this only happened once in a while it wouldn’t be so sad but it happens every week without fail. Why does this happen? It happens because so many patients and families don’t know about the benefits of hospice care. They don’t realize that hospice is about LIVING not dying. It’s about living the rest of your life on your terms, living your life with as much quality as possible, it’s about allowing your family to participate in a part of your life that will unfold no matter what we do. If you couple the above with physicians avoiding conversations related to End-of-Life Care, you get patients referred to hospice in the last hours and days of their life. I look at these names and feel regret for the patients and families as I think how much help our hospice team could have been physically, spiritually, psychologically and socially if we’d been involved during the last six months of their life. Next week I’ll have to start my apologies all over again to a list of names I’ve never seen before. “Sorry, I don’t recognize your name” I’ll be muttering under my breath as I go down the list and read the names one by one.

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