The Debate: Hospice or Not?

I called Emily to report that I had indeed given permission to put Mom on hospice.
She sent emails to our brothers, Bill near Tacoma, WA, and Jim near Denver.
After informing the staff at her residence, I spent the next 2-3 hours dealing with my grief.
But at 8:30 pm it occurred to me that our brothers deserved more than an email.
I called Bill to report to him and discuss the options. He hadn't read the email and was taken by surprise.
He's a general surgeon working at an Army hospital, and he wanted to know what her CBC was and her electrolyte levels.
"When were they last done?" he asked.
"I don't know... maybe last fall," I answered.
"Well, without that information we don't know if this is an acute crisis that could be turned around with hydration or whether it is a slow decline," he continued. "You should get her blood drawn to determine those things."
"The doctor did say that putting her in the hospital for hydration was the other option," I reflected. "We could still do that if you think it would be better."
"Here's why doctors order hospice," Bill said. "They're thinking, 'How do I let this patient die without making the family upset?' So they order hospice, mostly to take care of the family."
"Oh," I said.
"What kind of doctor is it? An internist?"
"She's a gerontologist," I said.
"Oh, of course she would put Mom on hospice then," Bill said. "They're just waiting for people to die. That's what they do." He was thinking of the contrast between surgeons like himself who do everything they can to save lives vs. gerontologists who accept death when it approaches, perhaps even too soon.
"If people get too dehydrated, they can't drink even if they want to," he continued. "Their throat gets flattened. But even then you can give them a Dovhoff tube down their nose into their stomach, not for food, just for water."
"She had nasal intubation to breathe when she had that allergic reaction and her throat swelled up," I said. "That's a pretty bad procedure. I don't think she'd like it."
"After it's done, people don't even notice that they have the tube in," he said. "But if they quit taking oral liquids and have no other means of hydration, people get confused and weak. First the kidneys fail--it takes 3-6 days for kidneys to fail. If they take no liquids at all for two days in a row, then they are not able to take them. Their creatinine goes up. They become comatose from the uremia."
"You mean they are poisoned by the things not cleaned out of their blood?" I asked.
"Yes--it's a terrible way to die," he said. "But if you give her two liters of saline solution by IV, you might get her eating and drinking again."
"Well, we could do that," I agreed.
"You can have it done in the doctor's office," he said.
"No, she doesn't do that in her office. But maybe I could take her to the ER and have it done there," I continued.
"Yeah, that should be just a few hours," he said. "You wouldn't even have to hospitalize her."
"Well, I'll call the doctor in the morning," I said. "But she has an appointment for a perm at 9:30 am and that will take until 12:30 0r later. We couldn't do it until after that."
"You don't have to hydrate her if you feel she can drink enough fluids on her own," Bill said. "You can go ahead and put her on hospice and just hope that she can continue to eat and drink for as long as possible."
"Yes, she did drink some milk this evening," I said. "I think she can still drink some."
So I hung up and lay awake for part of the night wondering whether to do hospice as Emily and I had agreed or to postpone it a day and first put her in the hospital for hydration.