Hospice Care & Your Loved Ones with Amy Yoffe & Shelley Chilton | Lifestyle Magazine with Roy Ice

[Music] this is lifestyle Magazine with your host Roy ice and key experts Mike Tucker Dr chany Long Lionel L mountain and Marie [Music] Mitchell it's hard to lose a loved one after an awful experience losing her parents Our Guest today Shelley Chilton was inspired to start a business to make sure other people didn't go through what she did Welcome Shelly thank you for being part of Lifestyle magazine today thank you for having me yeah so you do hospice care now yes I do but you started it because of your own experience what happened when I was in my 20s and I had had my first child my mother was diagnosed with a with breast cancer and uh later on a few months later we found out that it had metastasizes to her brain and to her bones and it was quite a journey and I went uh I lived in Los Angeles at the time and I was commuting to Sacramento where my parents lived um several times a week to um take care of her while my father had to go back to work and to see her I had a the little one that was tagging along and the experience of taking care of a loved one during that time is very spiritual and very special yeah and I had you know my dad and I didn't know what to do we didn't really have help what happened is someone showed up and they a nurse from a Health Plan showed up with a brochure once every two weeks and at the time I wasn't a nurse and so I was diagnosing my mom and trying to figure out what was wrong with her all of the things that go wrong with someone during the process at the end of their life it was really difficult uh we weren't warned that she was going to have seizures and other things that were really critical to know and would uh have helped us and assisted us so many times and understanding the process she had also to alleviate her pain and suffering um what ultimately happened is during the time I was taking care of her I was praying so much to have help help so she didn't suffer yeah and I made a vow with God I'm sorry no this is real you know families we barely know how to deal with life much less know how to deal with death I think that's the beauty of what you do now with hospice is you help people know how to deal with probably one of the most awkward situations we have to deal with it's difficult and you know when I I made that vow that I would change the way people were treated when they were dying um I had my mother ultimately of course passed away and I had kind of forgotten about it because I was busy with the child and working and I met my business partner um when I was working at the hospital and um her mom had done hospice was a hospice nurse and we were really attracted to each other's philosophies of life and um we became partners and she asked me one day if I knew about hospice and that was it I said that's what I'm supposed to be doing and so we started the hospice together unfortunately she couldn't make it today um but we started the hospice together it's been a quest we've been doing hospice for almost 30 years now wow now that you're a hospice specialist what what are some of the things that you wish you would have known when you were going through this with your own mother I wish there's so many things I wish that someone would have shown up instead of me diagnosing everything going wrong with my mother I wish that there was someone who could have talked to us and helped us through the grief process I wish that there was someone who could have showed me how to care for my mother to have bathed her to have done anything to help her someone that could have showed me how to turn her her so she didn't end up with wounds or anything now my mom didn't have wounds because I uh instinctively figured that out um but that was only because I I feel that I was guided yeah you said that she was in Sacramento how far away of a drive was it for you it was eight hours one way so I was taking that little baby and driving him uh eight hours you know a couple times I'd come home for a few days and then I'd get in my car and drive back and my dad unfortunately had to go back to work and people who generously donated their vacation and sick time to him so he could stay home to convalesce my mother during her chemo and treatments um but he had to go back to work and so that's when I ended up coming to take care of her and so there was a little baby running around that needed my attention and of course my beloved mother who needed my my attention so it was challenging it would have been really nice to have had some support you know and that's what our programs do today though they provide all of that that's awesome well I want to talk to you more about this but we got to take a break and when we come back we'll be joined by our relationship key specialist Mike Tucker and Amy yafi who has her own hospice story to tell stay [Music] tuned [Music] the loss of a loved one impacts one's entire Social Circle in this segment we'll talk to Amy yafi who was pregnant while supporting a grieving husband long distance Amy thank you so much for joining us now you've worked in hospice for how many years now it's been for 15 years wow what interested you into this field well I'm a licensed clinical social worker and I've worked in a variety of mental health and medical settings but at the end of my pregnancy with my second daughter my husband was out of town he was in Boston taking care of his mother who had breast cancer she was in hospice she was dying of breast cancer and I would get calls from him distraught emotionally devastated lost needing help and I felt so powerless because I was so far away I couldn't travel it was the end of my pregnancy and I felt like he wasn't getting the emotional support that he needed yeah so I decided when I was going to go back to work that I definitely wanted to go into hospice I wanted to help patients I wanted to help families throughout this journey which can be really scary and pretty painful right you are a social worker and when people think about hospice they don't often think about social work they think about nurses and doctors but tell me what it is that a social worker does for hospice yeah a a social worker focuses on the psychosocial and emotional needs of not just the patient but the family we help them to have really difficult conversations make decisions and um a lot of times people think that hospice is just a nurse but the concept of team is very important and it's the nurse a social worker a Hospice chaplain and a home health aid and everybody makes visits independently but works really closely together and is on the same page to respond I worked as a hosal chaplain and I have immense respect for everyone who works with hospice the nurses are a special quality the the nurses AIDS the social workers it's a marvelous organization and a marvelous team and I don't know that everyone recognizes the kind of support that can be given with with hospice so tell me some of the things that you do with your hospice well we are a Medicare certified program so the hospice actually evolved uh just a quick history of hospice um in the 1980s and this was when it was evolving with my mom it became kind of more of a formalized program of sorts it is now a very formalized program with really specific regulations and things that you can provide so it includes a team approach uh to care to a patient who has a terminal illness and is facing their mortality and during this process they have care from a phys their own attending physician or a hospice medical director the nurses who come in the home health aids who also come in as part of the team um the social workers like Amy the spiritual coordinators and chaplains who also come in and volunteers who are a blessing to everyone who come in and provide Companion Care and and someone to talk to who's not uh usually related to a formal profession but someone that can be a friend to the family we also have a hospice Foundation that helps with people who need caregiving um that are unable to have uh for that family and people around we also pay for short stays at facilities and if a patient does need an inpatient level of care we can provide that as well so we have facilities that we all work with one of the best things about hospice is that so many of the the financial issues are taken off the plate you know the family doesn't worry as much about this it's it's taken off the you can focus on being present and not being worried and the the Medical Care has been excellent um so even with the followup after the loss um I did bereavement coordination for the hospice that I worked for as a Chaplain and so we would follow families a year two years whatever was necessary in order to help them make that adjustment I I would imagine you have have someone that does that as well with your program yes we do we have a bereavement program and that includes counseling um as well as classes and grief recovery right and um we're actual specialists in in how we're able to administer the program and medications understanding a person's physiology during the process and um well educated in the the um dying process and the body's response yeah no one understands how to administer pain meds and yet allow some measure of clarity for the patient like hospice nurses and hospice Physicians is marvelous so what kinds of things do you do as a social worker in order to help I mean you talked about having those difficult conversations yes but there's also an adjustment to death that patients have to make anticipating their own loss that's something that you deal with as well yes that would be working with the patient on having the opportunity to have closure and relationships with family members and loved ones sometimes it's hard to reach a place of Peace when there are a lot of unresolved issues or perhaps conflict in the family and we can encourage patients to talk with one another you know people are very open and vulnerable at the end of life which is sometimes the best opportunity to do this work right and um it's really it's so rewarding and it's an to be welcomed into people's lives at this time that's so true and it's so vital to help families during this time and we've got to take a break but we're going to talk more about this when we come back we're going to talk further on how hospice can help your family when going through the often scary process of losing a loved one it's impossible to prepare for losing a loved one we're continuing our conversation on how hospice can be such a profound help now Shelley and Amy one of my big questions that I hear all the time is how does someone know when it's time for a hospice when it's too early when it's too late yeah that's a very good question um a good time to go on hospice can be when a doctor tells a patient that there are no there are no more effective treatment options available or a patient can decide that they no longer want to endure hospital visits and er visits tests and procedures they just want to be kept comfortable and focus on the quality of life at home that's a big key too because a lot of the times you're facing death and then you keep having these tests these procedures and it's not going to do any good and so when someone makes that decision I just want to be with my family I just want to have some peace and have some time of enjoyment and hospit can really help you do that with proper support proper medication those kinds of things and the early a person goes on hospice that gives them the opportunity to develop relationships with the hospice team to develop a sense of trust and sometimes if a person Waits too long then it feels so much like a crisis and everything becomes rushed and and it's more frightening that way so what's the longest term that someone could be on hospice there hospice has a lifetime benefit um but the average length of stay I believe currently in the Us is around 30 days or less so we do get patients that are in a crisis and they live sometimes 12 hours 24 hours that's not enough time for us to help the families help the patients prepare right for what's coming the other thing is that that hospice isn't a uh doesn't stop all treatment it isn't it isn't a program that stops everything so people think that when you go on hospice you don't get to have anything anymore and that is not true no I want to tell you that what happens is it's a shift from aggressive Curative treatment to aggressive quality of life so you can either try to have quantity which no one knows the quantity of their life we don't know from our birth what our quantities are but we do know what quality is so if we shift our Focus to aggressive quality of life and aggressively palliating the symptoms that you may have during this process then people actually are happy because you are being aggressively treated it's just a shift in focus of what you're getting treated for you mentioned the term palliating yes so can you talk a little bit about pallative care what that means paliative care um in general it falls under the CATE category of Home Health so it's more limited visits and it's focused on providing Comfort but a patient is still able to continue receive treatment and going to doctors hospice is more for focus on end of life of life so the idea is there's no more treatment that's going to be pursued because the options unfortunately are limited or like I said a person just wants to be able to focus on Comfort yeah and it hospice then allows that medical team to come to you instead of you getting getting up and going to doctor's appointments which may be very difficult in my view uh hospice is Home Health on steroids because you you continue with paliative me measures but you you also now add this whole team that helps you adjust to end of life issues and one thing that's unique to hospice is that you have someone to call 24 hours a day exactly so if something happens at 2 o'clock in the morning and a patient or a loved one doesn't know what to do they call Hospice and the triage nurse takes the call and we'll advise and guide them over the phone or send a nurse out if that's necessary my my wife for 40 years ended her life on hospice um and we had her there for about three or four days in the last 24 hours they actually had an LVN standing by who who stayed in our we had 12 hour shifts and stayed in our home with us for for those 24 hours and that was such a comfort to know we weren't going to mess this up you know and that allowed you to be the husband and not the caregiver not the nurse exactly mhm so one of the things and the differences between paliative and hospice is paliative care under Home Health can provide some support systems but what happens is people are very frightened when they're in paliative care paliative care means that they are facing the mortality and none of us want to do that we really want to stay with our loved ones here we want to be able to spend the time that we need to with our loved ones and our our grandkids or or whoever it may be no one wants to just leave their certain circumstance to an uncertain circumstance that they may be facing um even though we've had experiences that have been incredibly spiritually uplifting and knowing that people have been visited by loved ones and and those on their Journey um paliative care doesn't lend to that because the shift in your focus is still on Curative treatments and even though that you know that this is the end of your Cur Curative treatments on paliative care you can't really move to the next level where we really need to shift the focus and people do want to stay on paliative care for long periods of time but it doesn't really help when you're facing end of life end of life that's true Yeah you mentioned there are some people who've been able to have a great experience what's something that you've seen someone have as a great experience oh my gosh I have this you never of all of the thousands of patients that I have participated and care with you don't forget them yeah yeah [Music] um it's some of the young ones young that hurts doesn't it when when the young ones are on hospice and you see them go you you form a bond with these people um and they become a part of your family they become part of your life and and it's hard when I think of him because I think of so many and so many stories so I have a I have this one that was really challenging for me as a nurse and for her whole team Amy was part of this and this was a young mother who had a I think a 15-month-old and a three-year-old and she didn't know that she was in a hospice program and at home and she didn't understand what it meant and she asked me one day what it meant and I I had to I I didn't realize that her family hadn't really been working with her and helping her so she understood and once I told her that her Curative treatments she wasn't going to have anymore because they were ineffective and that she was facing her the end of her life her shift changed she was in a panic M yeah because she wouldn't be there for the birthdays yeah the the graduations the marriages so this hospice team that Amy works with and I work with jumped in got letters got volunteers to write letters for her children recorded her her advice so that they would hear from her in their lifetime and these are some of the things and she only lived for two weeks yeah not enough time for us to do things for her but what a gift what a gift what a great te absolutely and what a beautiful gift that both of you give to your community and we are so thankful for what you do and thankful for sharing with our viewers what is possible for them when we come back I have some final [Music] thoughts in the relationship key area of Our Lives tragedy and loss can come at any time isn't it great to know that there are Services now that allow us to focus on what is most important spending every quality moment with our loved ones if you find yourself going through this make every effort to utilize Hospice Care to help you make the most valuable use of your time with those you love for more meaningful life tips and an opportunity to view this show and all other episodes visit our website at lifestyle.org thanks for watching and we look forward to continuing this journey with you on future episodes of Lifestyle [Music] magazine