What are your hopes and fears?

In Palliative Care, we are consulted when someone with a serious illness might benefit from an added layer of physical, emotional, social, or spiritual support. People who ‘qualify’ for palliative care have a serious or life-limiting illness, wherein quality of life or quantity of life are or might be impacted by the illness. Every experience with a serious illness is unique. Without asking questions, we can’t know how to direct care- do we focus on treatment? Longevity? Quality of life? What is quality of life to a given person? 

Open-ended, intentional questions are a great place to start; and once you ask, keep listening. 

Let’s take a cancer diagnosis, and the standard of care is a particular chemotherapy regimen. A patient agrees to the regimen. What do we know about the patient? Only their diagnosis and that they agree to go through the regimen. Do we know why they want to go through chemo? Or what they are nervous about? And so we ask these simple but important and provocative questions: what are your hopes? and what are your fears or concerns? 

And this opens us up to learning what is most important to people. Are you going through chemo because you want to live to see your granddaughter’s graduation? Are you worried about nausea because food is what brings you joy? Are you afraid of not having the energy to care for your partner because you are the primary caregiver? Answers to these simple, open-ended questions gives us a wealth of information that then helps to guide current and future care and illuminate a person's values and situation. What are YOUR answers in this present time, with or without health concerns? How might asking your loved ones these questions guide your support for them? Please bring paper and a pen.

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