End of Life Decisions and the Christian Family
About this episode
The episode discusses the traumatic experience of a family dealing with a loved one's end-of-life decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
My father entered heaven in January of 2021. For our family, it was a traumatic experience. The Covid-19 virus spread through our church rapidly in December of 2020. We had to cancel services because there were no pastoral staff members healthy enough to lead. My father contracted the disease in that wave. He fought it off for several weeks at home before his low blood oxygen level demanded he go to the hospital. But even in the hospital, he did not improve. No one in our family was allowed to visit him there. Once he was moved to ICU, even my daughter, a nurse in that same hospital, was refused access to him. We communicated regularly with doctors and nurses and with him. He was intubated for several weeks, and then eventually weaned off the machine. Even off the ventilator, he still needed a pressurized mask to breathe. Dad had a hard time in the hospital separated from family. He was struggling for every breath and he was alone. On the day he died, we were Facetiming him and we listed to a doctor and nurse pressure him to remove his mask and die. I confronted them both by video and demanded that they stop trying to convince him to give up and die. They kept saying things like…
Topics covered
- end of life decisions
- Christian family
- hospital experience
- Covid-19 impact
- family communication
- medical ethics
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