A hospice nurse who uses her experience to educate and inform people about death and dying has advice that might be difficult to hear: stop trying to keep your loved ones alive at all costs.

When someone you love is critically ill, decisions about medical care can be tough. Despite impressive advancements, medicine isn’t an exact science, and families and medical teams must work together to determine what course of action offers the best chance of the desired outcome.

Those decisions become tougher when critical illness becomes terminal illness. Naturally, no one wants their loved one to die. But as Hospice Nurse Julie explains, some outcomes are worse than death.

Drawing on experience as an ICU nurse

Julie explains that she spent half of her 20 years as a nurse working in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). That experience led her to hospice care because she saw what can happen when people refuse to deal with the possibility of death.

“An ICU is a place where we keep people alive at all costs, or at least we try to,” she shares. “People who are super, super sick, and we do all these things medically to try to keep them alive. Now, granted, there were many times when we did wonderful things, and people did live on, which is amazing. But as the years went on, I started to see over and over and over again that we also had the group of people that we were keeping alive at all costs. And to me, it was far more brutal than allowing them to naturally die.”

She gave an example of a man who came in for a Whipple procedure for a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. It was a major surgery at the time, but if successful, it could add another five years to his life.

“I’ve had many Whipple patients who are in and out of the ICU within five days, and they do great,” she said. “But this particular........

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