When You Send Someone Home to Die

Many hospitals have little cards they send home to patients after they’re discharged, where everyone on the unit or anyone providing care signs with little things like “Good luck!” or “Take care!” Or, a lot of the time, they just write their name and call it good.

But what do you write on the card of the patient that you’re sending home to die? 

You spent hours talking with him at 3am while he told you how he nearly became a professional boxer before a car crash took out his shoulder and forced him into trucking, and about the love of his life, a feisty little Dachshund named Jasmine who was a “one man kinda woman”, and wouldn’t hesitate to serve him divorce papers, if she got the chance.

You chased his blood pressure at 1am with Dopamine, watching like a hawk as it ever so slowly crept back up, watching everything about him even when he was too tired to sit up and stay awake and keep an eye on himself.

You noticed that the as needed Roxicodone made him super drowsy, so initially you considered only the 5mg, but he hadn’t slept in three days because of the pain in his lungs from the cancer, so you gave him the full 10mg when he can have it and listened to him snore the night away. 

He offered you his apple and orange when his appetite for dinner never really came, because he noticed you sitting the other night charting without food, and wanted you to have food while you had to be stuck in front of the computer.

He told you a few times that your husband was a lucky man, and spent the night ending every thank you with very genuine “darling”, “dear”, and “sweetheart”.

 You know he’s going home with hospice care to a house with no family, his neighbors are his power of attorney because he doesn’t have family, and he’ll barely have enough money to get his new prescriptions for Oxycontin IR. The discharge papers given him less than six months to live, if that. 

You’re happy, in a way, knowing he’ll be able to go home, in his own bed, with his best girl at his side, and not have to die alone surrounded by cold machinery at the hospital. You’re relieved, knowing he won’t have to suffer that.

But you still don’t know what to write on that card, how to sum up a lifetime and no time at all within four white corners. 

And really, you probably never will.