I'm glad your mom wasn't in pain or anxious. My dad wasn't in pain but he needed the morphine to help ease his breathing. Removing the nasal gastric tube also helped his breathing. I'm sure he was dying from his disease, and not just the morphine, though it probably sped up the process. It's the treatment or lack thereof that led up to him needing Comfort Care which I have issues with. For example, two weeks earlier they had discharged him with an antibiotic without even doing a sputum culture. The doctor said there was a mixup at the lab. Then during his last admission they gave him two powerful nephrotoxic antibiotics by IV even though his sputum hadn't cultured for anything. No wonder his kidneys failed. At this point, I don't know if he had pneumonia or an exacerbation of his congestive heart failure, since they look the same on x-rays. He may have had both, but they only treated his pneumonia without knowing the cause. When I suggested he might be experiencing "braking" and that they should change his diuretic or try aquapheresis, they ignored me. Maybe if they had done that two weeks earlier he would still be alive. I should have gotten a second opinion, and I feel so guilty that I didn't. But he had had pneumonia six months before and recovered, so I thought they knew what they were doing.

Another thing is they gave him two pneumonia vaccines and he had his heart attack within hours of getting them. I wasn't there, because I was catching up on sleep. They talked him into getting the vaccines, but if I had been there, I would have asked them to wait until he recovered from his current pneumonia.

They kept insisting he take blood thinners and statins, but he was at a high risk of gastric bleeding and the Lipitor made him sick. He refused both. They kept saying he would have a stroke, if he didn't take at least aspirin. They had to take him off the aspirin, too. I'm so glad he didn't have a stroke. My poor mother died in October, 2014, a year after suffering a stroke which robbed her of her speech. She was in a nursing home. She didn't raise me, so I tend to focus more on my grief for my father, but it is so hard to lose both my parents within two months of each other.