Julie McFadden, a nurse who has gained online fame for her frank discussions about death and mortality, is on a mission to destigmatise the topic of death.
Having witnessed how verbalising their own mortality has aided her former patients in their final days, she believes open conversations about death can be beneficial.
Speaking to NHS surgeon Dr Karan Rajan on his podcast ‘Dr Karan Explores’, the hospice nurse delved into this often taboo subject.
The ex-ICU nurse revealed that while death can be a painful and devastating process, she has observed that patients who are willing to openly discuss their own death fare better.
She emphasised that these conversations don’t necessarily have to be positive. Nurse Julie shared: “Even in a negative way; ‘I’m afraid, I don’t want to, I’m angry’.
“They all seemed to have a lightness. They lived better while they were still alive. And their dying process, which does take a long longer time usually on Hospice, seemed easier. Less agitation, less pain, but then also less emotional pain, all because they spoke about it.”
The nurse acknowledged that certain aspects of death remain a mystery, even to medical professionals. She emphasised the importance of patients being honest and asking for help when needed, praising the support provided by hospice teams.
She shared: “You have professionals who do this day in and day out. There’s a chaplain who most people like will deny the chaplain because they’re not religious… no, this chaplain is an amazing person who’s just there to help you… like a free therapist. Let them come over, let them hang out.”
Drawing from her experience as an ICU nurse, Julie expressed a newfound respect for allowing the body to take its natural course in the final days.
She compared hospital deaths to those in hospice care, highlighting the often-counterproductive interventions in hospitals: “We pump people full of fluid and then we fluid overload them and then they go under respiratory distress, then we intubate them, then we diurese them, then we hurt their kidneys and it’s that cycle over and over again.”
In contrast, she observed that hospice care allows the body to die naturally, without unnecessary interventions: “When I saw my first death on Hospice, I was, I feared death so much less because I was like, wow, you could see how doing nothing to the body and allowing the body to just naturally die – there are things that our bodies do to help us do that.”
