Part 5 in a multi-part series about experiencing grief as a benefit leader.
- Part 1:
Dealing with death: The toll bereavement takes on advisers - Part 2:
Dealing with death: Responding to bereavement with patience and grace - Part 3:
Dealing with death: Healing from the fog of loss and grief - Part 4:
Dealing with death: How medical mishaps gave way to grief
K2 Strategic Founder Kristine Scheer took the lead during her family's quest to help manage their ailing mother's care. She also was able to leverage her connections in the concierge nurse support field to help navigate through the process.
Amanda Volner, assistant vice president of broker partnerships for Healthee, says family members appreciated that she had the knowledge to have meaningful conversations and advocate for her sister who became increasingly ill.
A poor job
Despite their expertise and connections, they all encountered similar hurdles. "I saw firsthand how poorly our U.S. healthcare system supports people who are dying and how poorly we support end-of-life care," Scheer laments.
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The doctors and other clinicians she encountered weren't very open about acknowledging the end was near for her mother. Her highly educated siblings asked lots of questions, but never received straight answers.
"All they would say is she's very sick," she explains. "There was nobody reminding us about hospice resources or offering a conversation with hospice. I had to fight for weeks just to get her a visit with a behavioral health specialist from the hospital."
That psychologist eventually afforded her mother the opportunity to
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The antiseptic way her mother was treated at the same hospital where she built her career as an operating room nurse felt dry, cold, impersonal and disconnected from human contact. Scheer would like to see more energy devoted to re-positioning terminally ill patients and moving pillows so that they don't get bed sores or giving daily baths.
"The level of dignity that she was given was so minimal, and it's absolutely inexcusable," she says.
Before traveling to Arkansas, Volner visited her young sister for the last time — reassuring her that everything was going to work out. The next morning, however, slurred words and an inability to lift her leg set the stage for other complications. On her way to a CT scan, her sister became
After being revived, an MRI was done and found that some of the abscess they thought had been surgically removed grew and spread in her brain, which had quite a bit of swelling. That explained her sister's uncontrollable pain. Numerous seizures and strokes and another brain surgery followed, and the expectation was that she would become brain dead in the next few days. Volner and her family were told to start saying their goodbyes.
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As the end drew near, they had a difficult conversation about organ donation (her sister's liver and two kidneys were harvested). Volner's family later decided to explore a wrongful death lawsuit and hired an attorney who didn't think they had a strong enough case.
While advocating for her parents was the hardest thing De Paoli has ever done, it was a final act of love and service. She says those experiences underscored the immeasurable value of compassion, both given and received. "Our roles as HR and benefit professionals uniquely position us to understand and assist others through difficult times," she adds.
