Advance Directives and the Hullabaloo over Healthcare Reform

In the Op-Ed section of today's Salt Lake Tribune, Dana Wilson, who was a professor of medicine at the University of Utah from 1970 to 1996, writes a cogent article urging thoughtful research on the topic of "Death Panels."  The article, called "To my fellow seniors: Nobody's gonna pull the plug on us!," she points to the actual bill and says the spinsters count on all of us to be lazy.  In other words, read the bill before screaming at your elected officials.

I believe that we have too few discussions about what our end-of-life wishes are and what it means exactly to keep a person alive. I worked in a hospital where I saw too many adult children demand that we "Do everything possible to keep grandma alive!" On one occasion, I witnessed a team of medical professionals working furiously to save a 90-year old woman by using CPR. The chest compressions were breaking the woman's ribs. Even if the efforts had been "successful," the woman's life would have never even approached anything like what she had prior to the event.  It was a gruesome scene that I will never forget. The attending physician turned to me and said, "If this woman's son is in the waiting room, please bring him in." 

The son had demanded that the doctors do whatever necessary to keep his mother alive--even though it was well documented that his mother had expressed a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order. I found the son and his wife and escorted the into the trauma room. When the son saw his lifeless mother being forcibly kept alive--knowing it was against her wishes and also knowing that she would never be able to return to a normal life, he asked the doctor to please stop.

Though deciding now what our wishes will be "in the event of" is difficult and even counter-intuitive for most of us, we do our loved ones a disservice to not have that candid conversation. As a close friend of mine who works in the Intensive Care Unit at a local hospital says, "There are worse things than dying."

I hope anyone interested in this debate will take the time to do two things: First, take Dana Wilson's suggestion and actually read the bill that is being proposed to congress.  Secondly, take the time to listen to the interview I did recently with Maureen Henry--the Executive Director of Utah's Commision on Aging--on the topic of Advance Directives including how to name a health care agent and complete a Living Will.

If you live in Utah, you can also go directly to the site www.UtahDirectives.org where you will find a toolkit and the necessary documents to make decisions about end-of-life care. If you are from a state other than Utah, the website www.HelpWithMyParents.com can provide you with the necessary links under the category "Advance Directives" to direct you to where you can learn about what you need to do to complete a form detailing your health care wishes.

If you need to speak with someone about this topic, contact us via the Help With My Parents website and we'll respond to you directly.