Family member does not want to be in hospice facility

My mother in law has terminal cancer. She stopped treatment in February and had arranged to have home hospice. Starting in the spring.

It was going ok until About two weeks ago. She suddenly took a steep dive (seemingly overnight) from being able to be up and about the house to suddenly being extremely nauseous alternating with extreme pain depending on when/how her medications were administered.

She called her brothers and my husband to her bedside and said she wanted to “end it.” However when they were all together she hesitated.

During this time she’s getting more and more confused, paranoid, and generally out of it. She struggled to use the bathroom and only wanted apple juice.

My husband and her brothers are not nurses. They were struggling to manage her meds despite the hospice service being on call. Her fentanyl patch kept falling off in the middle of the night, causing extreme pain to flare.

When her brother mentioned moving her to a facility she said “they’ll kill me.” A few days later my husbands uncle made the decision to move her. She needed 24 nursing and they couldn’t keep it up beyond a week.

She is now in the facility and is upset. She keeps trying to get out of the bed, complains about the mattress. Her pain is much more under control because everything can be administered with IV. She has a catheter so she doesn’t need to struggle to use the toilet.

We know this is for the best but it’s heartbreaking. She wanted to die at home, but somehow there was a disconnect in how the doctors communicated what her last days would be like. I guess she thought she would just sleep, not realizing there might be this period where she was losing her mind.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Posted Jul 6, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

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