What Can Palliative Care Do for Someone with Terminal Lung Cancer?

Once someone you love is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, you immediately want to do all that you can to help her. One of the best ways to do that is to find treatment options that meet her needs. Palliative care is one such option that you might want to consider, because of its focus on keeping your family member comfortable and protecting her quality of life as much as possible.

Palliative Care Is about Balance and Options

Palliative Care Spokane County, WA: Terminal Lung Cancer

Palliative Care Spokane County, WA: Terminal Lung Cancer

People with terminal illnesses like lung cancer often feel as if they don’t have any options at all. Palliative therapies can open up those options, giving lung cancer sufferers more choices than they had before. Treatments designed to help cure lung cancer tend to focus just on the illness, whereas palliative treatments focus on balancing curative therapies with your family member’s overall wellness.

Palliative Options Can Coexist with Curative Options

The best part of this type of treatment is that it can coexist with curative treatments, too. Your family member doesn’t have to give up one set of treatments in order to embrace another. It’s possible for her to continue with those curative therapies for as long as she feels she’s getting something from them. Her healthcare options grow instead of shrinking. 

Symptom Relief Is Vital

One of the issues with terminal lung cancer is that the symptoms can be incredibly difficult to manage. For your family member, that may mean that she’s finding the pain, fatigue, and shortness of breath of lung cancer difficult to bear. But she may find it equally impossible to deal with the side effects of other treatments, such as chemotherapy. Palliative care helps to relieve all types of symptoms as much as possible, no matter what is contributing to them.

Holistic Care that Includes Emotional Well-being Is Also Important

But there’s also more going on than just physical symptoms and side effects. Your family member is likely dealing with a lot of emotional distress as well. It’s extremely common with terminal health conditions to experience fear, anxiety, and depression related to the illness and to what is going on. Palliative care helps your family member to find solutions that support all of her needs, including the emotional ones.

Family Members Need Support, Too

The people who love and care for your family member also need some support while they’re helping your family member. Palliative treatment helps all of you to find the support that you need so that you can be there for your family member even more. Understanding lung cancer and how it impacts your family member, finding respite care options, and dealing with anticipatory grief are all vital pieces of the puzzle that palliative care helps to put together.

Facing terminal lung cancer is never easy, but you and your family member don’t have to go through it alone. Embracing the help that palliative care services can offer sooner rather than later can be an important part of your family member’s entire treatment process.

If you or an aging loved-one is considering Palliative Care in Spokane County, WA please contact the caring staff at Angel Senior Care today at (509) 326-4357.

Vaughn & Donna Young