The Symptoms of Dying
Some symptoms, like the death rattle, air hunger and terminal agitation, appear agonizing, but aren’t usually uncomfortable for the dying person.
Air hunger — the uncomfortable feeling of breathing difficulty — is one of the most common end-of-life symptoms that doctors work to ease.
Since air hunger and pain activate similar parts of the brain, opiates may simply work by muting the brain’s pain signals.
Some researchers think the discomfort of air hunger is from the mismatch between
the breathing our brain wants and our lungs’ ability to inflate and deflate.
They take the “hunger” out of “air hunger.”
Others believe that the amount of morphine needed to relieve air hunger may have little effect on our ability to breathe.
You’d guess that opiates would worsen air hunger.
Sometimes the tongue propels saliva backward before the epiglottis has time to cover the airway.
The answer hinges on defining why air hunger is uncomfortable in the first place.
Opiates provide relief because they tune our brain’s appetite for air to what our body can provide.
