Time to Say Goodbye

With the help of the palliative care team, a patient leaves this world surrounded by family and at peace.

 
A mother of 10 children and grandmother to 22, Mary Hartney realized that her time on earth was slipping away. She also desperately wanted her children around her in her final hours, and she knew that the coming fall would be a very busy time for many of them. So she took the matter into her own hands and decided that she was going to call the shots. It was simply time.

 
Mary suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring in the lungs that makes it increasingly difficult for them to transfer oxygen into the bloodstream. There is no single cause for the disease, and its symptoms — including a dry, hacking cough, fatigue and weight loss — are common for a number of ailments, often delaying diagnosis for months or even years.

“The disease was fairly aggressive near the end,” says daughter Martha Hartney, the youngest sibling. “The last episode came on suddenly, and she wasn’t able to bounce back at all. She entered the hospital in May and never got out.” Prior to this time, Mary had used supplemental oxygen to help make life easier, but now she was relying on it for life support. “She didn’t want to continue on those terms,” Martha says, “knowing that if she took it off, she’d pass away.” To Mary, that wasn’t living. In fact, it was downright unacceptable, but she feared that electing to forgo her lifeline was akin to suicide, and that was also unacceptable to the devout Catholic.

After consulting with several priests and the ministers in the palliative care program at Little Company of Mary, Mary was relieved to learn that although church doctrine is more strict than our judicial system in its stance on what constitutes “end of life,” it does allow that a patient has a right to end and refuse life support if it means an end to their suffering. Once she and her children felt comfortable that her refusal of oxygen would not constitute a suicide, she chose a date and called everyone together for a final farewell. “She wanted to be able to call her children to her side and have us near in her last moments so she could see all of us before she left,” Martha says. “Most of us don’t have that opportunity, but Dr. [Glen] Komatsu and the palliative care team, including the nurses and the ministers, helped walk her down that long, long road and made it easier for her to say goodbye on her own terms.”   Continue »

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