Hospice doctor reveals the main thing people get wrong about death
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty
A doctor working in a hospice has opened up about what people get wrong about dying.
It's not something that people like to think about, but all of us have to confront our own mortality in the end.
But when the end does arrive many of us will end up in a hospice, where medical staff are trained to carry out end of life care to make sure that our final days are good, and our passing is as comfortable as can be reasonably expected.
Dr Michelle Hills is one of those who has the extremely important but unenviable task of helping people who are coming to the end of their life, and shared something she thinks is a big misconception about death.
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While death is never an easy process, it is a part of life, and it's important that we find a way to come to terms with it, either when grieving loved ones or coming to the end of our own lives.
And for Dr Hills, there's one thing with talking about death which is a big misconception.
This is that people can sometimes feel that talking about someone dying means that they are 'giving up' on a loved one, so acknowledging that there is now no hope of recovery.
But Dr Hills explained to Metro that she believes the opposite is actually the case.
As if providing end of life care is not already a difficult job, Dr Hills is a paediatrician, meaning that she has the unimaginably difficult task of caring for children a terminal health condition at Martin House Children’s Hospice in the UK.
Explaining why she thinks that accepting death is not 'giving up', she said: "I was talking with the father of a child who was stopping chemotherapy and dying and he said to me, 'how can we just give up on him?', then in the same week, a dear, dying friend told me, 'I feel like I’m giving up'."
She added: "Yet neither of them were giving up on anything. They were both finding peace with the fact that death could not be avoided and doing what they could. The time left is even more precious. And accepting is not giving up."
In an upcoming book called The Wrong Order of Things, she writes: "I wish people felt more comfortable using the words 'dying' and 'died'.
"Phrases like 'passed' or 'gone to sleep' can be confusing and misunderstood, particularly by children or people whose first language isn’t English.’"
She shared that another misconception around palliative care is that it is only about being somewhere that you go to die.
"Palliative and hospice care is about living before you die,’ the doctor explained. "It’s about high-quality care focused on quality of life."