If your family member is enrolled in hospice, you will likely receive opioids to administer if your loved one is having uncontrolled pain or is experiencing delerium—or both.
When my mother-in-law was on hospice in Ohio the family was given an opioid called Dilaudid and a set of syringes they could use to squirt a prescribed amount in her mouth.
We noticed that the Dilaudid did not seem to be working. Shortly after being given a dose my mother-in-law would wake up, cry out, and verbalize in discomfort. And she would try to move, and could not. It was distressing.
My wife and I knew that hospices in Illinois use morphine for this purpose rather than Dilaudid. We asked the hospice nurse about morphine.
“We used to use it but we noticed that patients weren’t getting it and we weren’t getting it back,” she said. “People were stealing it.” Hence the Dilaudid, which didn’t seem as effective.
The nurse also asked that we save our coffee grounds so any unused opioids could be squirted into it and disposed of safely. They had run out of their usual charcoal bags that they usually had for this purpose.
It made me wonder: why not set up a business to recycle coffee grounds and donate them to hospices? Some enterprising person should turn that into a business.
