Heart-Shock Device May Disrupt Quiet Hospice Death
By Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press
If you have a heart-zapping defibrillator implanted in your chest but now are dying of something else, when do you have it turned off?
Carol Filak had heard about painful, repeated shocks that people sometimes experience from those implants in their final days. So when her father, Joseph Hoffman, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she asked at his cardiologist's office: What about the defibrillator he'd had implanted years earlier? It's too soon to worry about, she was told.
Two months later, Hoffman, 81, entered hospice care in his West Orange, N.J., home and still Filak had to make numerous calls to the cardiologist before someone arrived to deactivate the defibrillator. "You need to be told that this is something that's not going to prolong his life," says Filak. "When he died, it was a very peaceful death."
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