Now, the first point to make about palliative care – and perhaps it’s the most important point of all – is that discussions about palliative care do not mean that the end of life is just about to happen. In fact, good medical practice encourages your doctors and nurses and other professionals to start discussions about palliative care early so that plans can be made in a well planned out way. That way you will not have to improvise or take emergency measures. So chances are that you will be thinking about and talking about the various options for palliative care before – perhaps long before – you actually need them. And that’s a very important thing to bear in mind, because it’s usually much easier to deal with your feelings about something before it actually happens.
A good way to start thinking about this topic is to try to think of all your medical needs during a regular day. Maybe it will help you to think through a regular day and try to see what the medical problems and needs are from the time you wake up, as you go to the bathroom, make breakfast and so on. How much of this can you do on your own and how many things do you need help with? If you are spending a lot of your day in bed, how hard is it for you to go to the bathroom or move to a chair or couch? When you are lying down, how comfortable are you – do you have pain only when you move or is it there all the time? It may even help you to make a list (this might be helpful for your nurse or doctor too).
A good way to start that process is to go through a regular day in your mind and just note down those times and activities that are difficult or simply not possible. That way you’ll end up with a sort of balance-sheet of your day’s activities – if the “difficult” column has a lot more in it than the “can do” column, then this might be a good time to consider getting more help from the palliative care team.
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This page was last updated: October 27th, 2004 at 9:52am.
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