What is PPC?
Pediatric Palliative Care You may have never heard the term Palliative Care or don’t fully understand what it means. Below is a definition taken from Wikipedia:
Palliative care (from Latin palliare, to cloak) is any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than striving to halt, delay, or reverse progression of the disease itself or provide a cure. The goal is to prevent and relieve suffering and to improve quality of life for people facing serious, complex illness. Non-hospice palliative care is not dependent on prognosis and is offered in conjunction with curative and all other appropriate forms of medical treatment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palliative_care
In today’s world, we expect our children to outlive us. For most people this happens, but for some, unfortunately, it does not. When your child is diagnosed with a terminal illness or condition, you become totally overwhelmed with so many thoughts, issues and decisions such as:
- Trying to process the devastating information you have just been told about your child
- Doing all that you can possibly do to help emotionally and physically comfort your child
- Analyzing your family’s current financial status and how that will affect upcoming medical decisions
- Making a decision as to whether you will remain at your job or if you can possibly stay home in order to care for your child
- Trying to hold the family together and keep things as normal as possible for any siblings living in the household
- Grasping to have an understanding of all the medical knowledge being thrown at you
- Possibly researching on your own to help teach yourself more about this terminal illness or condition
- Possibly researching and networking to find as many physicians across the country that work with children that have this diagnosis
- Taking in all this medical information given to you and trying to make the best medical decisions for your child
- Making a plan of how to fit in all the doctor’s appointments, testing, and therapy that your child will need
- Trying to cope with your own emotions as you are dealing with the reality that your child is dying before you
Pediatric Palliative Care is there for you! They are there for the child that is suffering from a life-threatening illness or condition through providing physical, emotional, and spiritual support services to that child and also to their family. The palliative team can help with pain management, informing and involving the child and/or family in decision making, providing emotional and spiritual support for siblings and other family members, facilitate in the acquiring of needed equipment, facilitate the care and information needed to be shared between the many doctors that are involved, and offer bereavement support to the family before and after a child’s death.
You can learn more about Pediatric Palliative Care by going to the links below.
Links
The Initiative for Pediatric Palliative Care