Hospice nurse reveals the key to a peaceful death
Hospice nurse Julie McFadden has shared her best advice for ensuring a peaceful death, after learning from her patients in their final moments.
The healthcare professional, who is known for her YouTube channel where she shares information about death to break the taboo of conversations around dying, shared a video about what you can do in life to ensure a peaceful passing.
In the recent clip, she shared what you can do in order to have a peaceful death, and she says it comes down to preparedness and acceptance.
"That's one of the biggest things I see," she explained. "People who plan for death will tend to have a more peaceful death than those who do not plan for death."
"A prepared death versus a non-prepared death - that's the one thing that I've seen in all of my patients," she explained.
Julie said she noticed the patients that were "willing to talk about the hard stuff" had a more peaceful death.
"[That means] willing to ask the questions about, 'how long do you think I have? What can I expect? What should I do before I die to make this easier for my family?'" she listed.
Julie went on to share a story of when a patient of hers died peacefully surrounded by his family, explaining that the patient was in hospice and had started to decline around 20 minutes after she arrived.
"He started having weird changes in breathing, so this was a sudden decline and it looked like he may suddenly die," she recalled, adding the abrupt change was "uncommon actually" in hospice care.
"What I noticed was because this family - and him - were so prepared, instead of the family [being] chaotic and reacting in an emotional way - which is very normal - they flipped along right with him," she explained.
"[They laid] in bed with him. They understood immediately what was happening. They didn't panic," she shared.
Julie said the man was surrounded by his loving family and it was an overwhelmingly emotional experience.
"It makes me cry every time I think about it - that vision of them all being able to understand what was happening, even though it was a change they didn't want," she explained.
"By the end of that visit he died, so he went from kind of looking okay to dying which is hard - but that family made it a beautiful moment," she said.
Image credits: YouTube