The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying
Enhancing Life Near Death
By Lion’s Roar Staff
[I]n this video, Ostaseski talks with Lion’s Roar’s Lindsay Kyte about the lessons he’s learned at the bedsides of thousands of dying people, his new book The Five Invitations, and the future of end-of-life care.
[I]n the year 2011, the Baby Boomer generation started turning 65. Over the next 13 years, 10,000 Boomers will reach retirement age every day.
For the adult children of the Baby Boomers, these are not abstract statistics but real-life turning points that can provoke uncertainty and anxiety. But consider the advice of certified financial planner and author Lise Andreana:
“There is no time like the present to begin preparing for your aging parents’ financial future. Being proactive can help minimize a great deal of stress and uncertainty down the road — for your parents, yourself, and your entire family.”
The Simple Dollar is here to help you begin the journey of guiding your parents through this stage of their lives. We’ll cover how to approach the conversation, documents you’ll need, costs to consider, and more. Let’s get started.
Broaching the subject
Power of attorney
Document checklist
Long-term care costs
The sibling situation
Glossary
Additional resources
Every family is different, and yours may have its own quirks or hangups about money. Although no size fits all, here are some suggestions on having The Talk with your parents:
Many senior care experts recommend following the 40/70 Rule. As you approach 40 and your parents approach 70, it can be the most opportune time to discuss financial issues, as well as long-term care, estate planning and other relevant topics.
It’s better to address the situation proactively than to wait for a crisis to unfold, which could force your family into making decisions on the fly.
Be on the lookout for warning signs that your parent may be struggling to manage his or her finances, which can include:
To help prevent conflict with your parents when you talk about finances, consider the following.
When in doubt, preserve your parents’ dignity. Be aware of the potential for wounded pride — speak respectfully and tread lightly.
“Start the conversation early. Put in place a plan your family can follow when your parents can no longer make decisions on their own. … It’s important to ask questions and help your parent come to a decision on his or her own terms.”
Terri Rasp
Director of Sales, Analytics, and Training
StoneGate Senior Living, LLC
A power of attorney, also called a POA, is a legal document that grants a person or organization (known as the agent or attorney-in-fact) the authority to act on behalf of someone (the principal) in specific financial, legal and health-related matters.
A POA with you as the agent and your parent or parents as principal could play an integral role in helping you protect their financial well-being. With a power of attorney in place, you will be able to act quickly if a parent suffers a medical emergency, for example, or experiences a steep decline in mental competence.
The answer is, most likely, yes. You don’t necessarily have to go through an attorney, but it’s probably the wisest course of action. The power of attorney process can vary from state to state, and trying to go it on your own could result in a costly oversight.
Unless you’re an attorney or a financial adviser, you may not have the expertise to navigate these waters. Also important is the fact that a professional often brings some much-needed objectivity to a situation where emotions can cloud the issues.
Some legal advice websites let you download a printable version of your state’s POA form. However, bear in mind that you’re dealing with the complexities of legal documents and contracts. There’s no shame in seeking the advice of your family attorney, your financial adviser, or both to help you craft a POA that addresses your family’s specific needs.
The key factor in a child-parent power of attorney is obtaining it proactively, before the parent loses the ability to manage their own affairs.
A lot depends on the current status of the parents and when the family wants the POA to take effect. An attorney may recommend a durable power of attorney, which contains a durability provision to ensure it remains in effect if the principal’s condition changes. The change in status could be a sudden medical issue that leaves the parent debilitated or a deterioration in mental capacity.
A power of attorney covering financial affairs differs from a health care POA, which means you’ll need to address those issues separately.
Depending on the laws of your state, getting a POA for a parent who has dementia or Alzheimer’s disease may require a letter from a physician affirming that your parent understands what the POA means and can legally consent. If a parent is deemed unable to meet that standard, another option may be for the child to become an adult guardian or conservator instead — a process that would require a judge’s approval.
No, there’s a difference. A living will expresses the signer’s wishes regarding medical treatment in the event he or she loses the capacity to make decisions (for example, whether extraordinary measures should be taken to preserve their life or resuscitate them). This kind of document is sometimes called an advance health care directive.
As with a power of attorney, state-specific versions of living wills are available online. Still, it’s wise to consult an attorney about the specifics of your situation.
“Prior to cognitive decline, I advise my clients to help their parents establish the proper paperwork. This includes the creation of a will, durable power of attorney, health care power of attorney, and advanced directives. The power of attorney forms are very powerful documents that should only be in the hands of somebody your parents trust. Whether that is a family member or a professional, it is up to them.”
Nate Byers
CPA/PFS, MBA
JBC Wealth Advisors, LLC
Here’s a list of important documents for reviewing a parent’s finances. These records will help you get a better idea of income and financial obligations. Double-check this list with your financial adviser to see if anything needs to be added.
_ Bank accounts
_ Credit card statements
_ Monthly bills (utilities, rent/mortgage, subscriptions, etc.)
_ List of loans and other debts
_ Social Security statements
_ Social Security benefit verification letter
_ Pension, 401k and annuity documents
_ Tax returns (for three to seven years)
_ Investment documents (savings bonds, stock certificates, brokerage accounts, etc.)
_ Insurance policies — life, health, and property
_ Vehicle titles
_ Property deeds
_ Dues-paying memberships (HOA, AARP, clubs, etc.)
_ Birth certificates and marriage licenses
Don’t forget …
_ List of their usernames and passwords for online customer portals
_ Combination/keys to their safety deposit boxes
“The first thing that children should do is to start aggregating information on the parents’ financial information. Help your parents consolidate their holdings. Fewer bank accounts can save you tons of time.”
Scott W. Johnson
Owner, WholeVsTermLifeInsurance.com
When looking at long-term care solutions, be aware that private insurance and Medicare have some limitations. While Medicare and insurance do provide coverage for medical treatment and prescription drugs, custodial care such as long-term care facilities and home health care may be a different story. As a 2013 study points out, Medicare:
In some unfortunate cases, coverage gaps in Medicare and private insurance can lead to families exhausting financial resources (known as “spending down”) until their parents qualify for Medicaid. To help prevent this worst-case scenario, you may want to consult a financial planner about some proactive options such as:
Expenses covered by long-term care insurance generally include assisted living, nursing home, adult day care, Alzheimer’s care facilities and hospice. The key is encouraging parents to buy coverage early, before they develop health problems.
Pros and cons include: LTCI can be pricey, although it could cover some expenses that Medicare or private insurance do not.
This option involves converting a life insurance policy into funding specifically for long-term care. These insurance conversions are also called life care assurance, Medicaid life settlement, or life care funding. It’s commonly used as part of a spend-down strategy to receive Medicaid eligibility.
Pros and cons include: This strategy can provide an immediate source of funding. However, the family will lose the death benefit that an unconverted insurance policy would have provided.
Some aging homeowners turn to reverse mortgages (also called home equity conversion mortgages) to turn their equity into cash while still retaining ownership.
Pros and cons include: Although it can provide a cash infusion, using a reverse mortgage to pay for senior care is a potentially risky, “last resort” type of move. Not everyone will qualify, and defaulting could lead to loss of ownership.
Unlike Medicare, Medicaid is jointly administered by the federal government and individual state governments. As a result, eligibility requirements and other rules vary from state to state.
In general, though, Medicaid recipients must have low incomes and assets with very low value. The program is intended to benefit the poorest Americans, so many middle-class families likely don’t qualify.
To get more information, check with the agency that manages Medicaid in your state. You can also contact an elder law attorney in your state or visit these websites:
To claim a parent as a dependent, your financial support for them must be substantial — at least 50% of the total cost for housing, food, medical care and other items. Also, the parent can’t earn more than the personal exemption for that tax year (which was $4,050 in 2016).
So, unless your parent has a very low income and you pay more than half the cost of keeping them cared for, they probably wouldn’t qualify as a dependent. If the parent does qualify, you could receive tax benefits such as the Dependent Care Tax Credit and reduced taxable income.
To get definitive answers, ask your tax preparer. You can also call the IRS or make an appointment at a local Taxpayer Assistance Center.
“When budgeting for an aging parent, Medicare costs need to be factored in. They pay a monthly premium for Medicare Parts B and D for life and then also a Medigap or Medicare Advantage plan to pay for the things like deductibles and coinsurances that Medicare doesn’t cover.”
Danielle Kunkle
Co-founder, Boomer Benefits
Among adult siblings, the care of aging parents has the potential to spark conflict like few other subjects. Handling parents’ finances is no exception.
It’s not uncommon for someone who takes the lead as caregiver to feel overburdened and resentful toward a sibling taking a less active role. Fortunately, a personal care contract or caregiver agreement can help ensure that the sibling who makes the most sacrifices is at least financially compensated.
Under this type of agreement, parents or other family members agree to reimburse the family member acting as caregiver. Compensation options include:
An elder law attorney can help you draw up a caregiver agreement. As for the form that compensation takes, families should think carefully about options that could lead to future conflicts between siblings (specifically, an estate plan or home transfer).
Even if you have a financial arrangement in place, don’t forget that sibling caregivers often have emotional needs in addition to financial ones. Expert tips on how to defuse conflict and increase support include:
“Personal care agreements are valuable for two very different reasons. One is emotional, for the family caregiver to feel as though they have a ‘real’ job and have at least a written record of what they need to do. Many have to cut back on work or stop working during a period of caregiving. The agreements can also serve as a record of the work done for siblings.”
Michael Guerrero
Senior Benefits Adviser
Elder Care Resource Planning
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
[R]icky Hurst’s doctors told him last year that there was nothing more they could do. His heart was failing and he should get his affairs in order. The end was coming.
His family gathered. He spoke to his pastor and resigned himself to death. “If it was meant to be, it was meant to be,” he said.
But. Mr. Hurst, 56, a former ranger and school football coach in Jackson, Mich., is still alive, although his heart continues to weaken. And patients like him are raising a new dilemma for doctors.
Heart disease once killed ruthlessly and quickly; patients like Mr. Hurst succumbed to heart attacks and sudden death from cardiac arrest. But with improved medical care and implanted devices that bolster the heart, a growing number of heart patients survive for years, even decades, coping with a chronic, progressive condition punctuated by crises and hospitalizations.
Their disease at that point is called heart failure — their weakened heart cannot pump enough blood to supply the body’s needs. The number of Americans with heart failure increased to 6.5 million in 2011-2014 from 5.7 million in 2009-2012, according to the American Heart Association.
More than 10 percent of those over age 80 have heart failure, and more patients are living longer with advanced disease. Even as the death rate from heart attacks is falling, the figure for heart failure is rising.
Yet there are no widely accepted guidelines for dealing with these patients as they near death. Cancer specialists regularly move their patients to hospice at the end of life, for instance, but few cardiologists even think of it. Heart patients account for just 15 percent of hospice deaths, while cancer patients make up half, according to a recent study.
That paper, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, reviewed a number of ways in which heart patients are let down at the end of life. Implanted defibrillators often remain activated until the very end, for example, even for those in hospice.
A fifth of heart patients with defibrillators get shocked by them in the last few weeks of life, and 8 percent get shocked minutes before dying. Most patients are never told that they can ask that the defibrillators be turned off.
“Getting shocks at the end of life is not really helping patients live longer or better,” said Dr. Larry Allen, a heart failure specialist at the University of Colorado and an author of the study.
“We shouldn’t have a single one of these cases happening,” said Dr. Haider Warraich, a cardiology fellow at Duke University and first author of the study.
Experts often focus on the strides made in preventing and treating heart disease. Its incidence has declined by 70 percent in the past 50 years. People have heart attacks later in life than they used to, are more likely to survive them, and often live for years afterward with few or no symptoms.
“We are very proud” of that progress, said Dr. Patrice Desvigne-Nickens, a medical officer at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
Still, she added, cardiologists and their patients should be discussing end-of-life options and palliative care earlier in the course of heart failure.
“Everyone is uncomfortable with end-of-life discussions,” she said. “The field of cancer may be ahead of us. We should learn from looking at their example.”
But cardiologists thrive on the dramatic saving of lives, said Dr. Michael Bristow, a cardiologist at the University of Colorado Denver. They devote their professional lives to rescuing patients having heart attacks and bringing them back from the brink.
End-of-life care is not typically their focus; neither do they spend much time pondering what some of their patients may experience in the future. “Those who go into cardiology are not necessarily ones who want to deal with death and dying,” Dr. Bristow said.
The very nature of end-stage heart failure makes it all the more difficult to prepare.
“Very few patients understand the trajectory of the disease,” said Dr. Lynne Warner Stevenson, a heart failure specialist at Vanderbilt University. The path has peaks and valleys, but as the patient declines, each peak is a little lower than the one before.
And often doctors do not tell patients what to expect.
“Unfortunately, when you have patients with a chronic illness like heart failure, everyone thinks someone else will talk about it,” Dr. Stevenson said. “Too often, no one takes ownership of the last stage of the journey with the patient.”
Dr. Ellen Hummel of the University of Michigan, one of a small number of doctors specializing in cardiology palliative care, said the typical patient with cancer will usually experience a “fairly predictable” decline.
“They will be less able to take care of themselves,” she said. “They will be more symptomatic and come back to the hospital more frequently. And once this starts, it will probably continue until they die. Most people can see the end coming.”
But patients with end-stage heart failure are more likely to have wild swings, Dr. Hummel said, veering from feeling better to being terribly ill.
“It is confusing to both the patient and provider. Are they actually dying, or can we rescue them from a particular episode of worsening?”
Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale University, agreed: “The issue is knowing who is really at the end of life.” For patients with heart failure, seesawing between good periods and bad, it can be very difficult to make the call.
Dr. Allen recently discussed all this with a patient, Ed Harvey.
Mr. Harvey, 75, has an implanted defibrillator, and his heart is weakening, pumping progressively less blood. Dr. Allen gave him medications that helped for a while, but, Dr. Allen said, “we have maxed out on what can be done.”
He can’t say with any certainty how long Mr. Harvey has. But now is the time, Dr. Allen told him, to talk about the end of life.
Mr. Harvey still feels pretty good, but “when you have congestive heart failure and it is not getting any better, you know that day is going to come,” he said.
He has been living with heart failure for more than a decade, and fears becoming a burden as his heart gets worse. It is now so weak that the only medical option left is an implantable pump. He knows that soon he will need full-time care.
“I have elected that if it got to that point,” he said, “put me in a hospice and let me go.”
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
By Jennie Dear
[N]essa Coyle calls it “the existential slap”—that moment when a dying person first comprehends, on a gut level, that death is close. For many, the realization comes suddenly: “The usual habit of allowing thoughts of death to remain in the background is now impossible,” Coyle, a nurse and palliative-care pioneer, has written. “Death can no longer be denied.”
I don’t know exactly when my mother, who eventually died of metastatic breast cancer, encountered her existential crisis. But I have a guess: My parents waited a day after her initial diagnosis before calling my brother, my sister, and me. They reached me first. My father is not a terribly calm man, but he said, very calmly, something to this effect: “Your mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer.”
There was a pause, and then a noise I can best describe as not quite a sob or a yell, but feral. It was so uncharacteristic that I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know, whether the sound came from my father or my mother.
For many patients with terminal diseases, Coyle has observed, this awareness precipitates a personal crisis. Researchers have given it other names: the crisis of knowledge of death; an existential turning point, or existential plight; ego chill. It usually happens as it did with my mother, close to when doctors break the news. Doctors focus on events in the body: You have an incurable disease; your heart has weakened; your lungs are giving out. But the immediate effect is psychological. Gary Rodin, a palliative-care specialist who was trained in both internal medicine and psychiatry, calls this the “first trauma”: the emotional and social effects of the disease.
The roots of this trauma may be, in part, cultural. Most people recognize at an intellectual level that death is inevitable, says Virginia Lee, a nurse who works with cancer patients. But “at least in Western culture, we think we’re going to live forever.” Lee’s advanced-cancer patients often tell her they had thought of death as something that happened to other people—until they received their diagnosis. “I’ve heard from cancer patients that your life changes instantly, the moment the doctor or the oncologist says it’s confirmed that it is cancer,” she says.
The shock of confronting your own mortality need not happen at that instant, Coyle notes. Maybe you look at yourself in the mirror and suddenly realize how skinny you are, or notice your clothes no longer fit well. “It’s not necessarily verbal; it’s not necessarily what other people are telling you,” Coyle says. “Your soul may be telling you, or other people’s eyes may be telling you.”
E. Mansell Pattison, one of the early psychiatrists to write about the emotions and reactions of dying people, explains in The Experience of Dying why this realization marks a radical change in how people think about themselves: “All of us live with the potential for death at any moment. All of us project ahead a trajectory of our life. That is, we anticipate a certain life span within which we arrange our activities and plan our lives. And then abruptly we may be confronted with a crisis … Whether by illness or accident, our potential trajectory is suddenly changed.”
In this crisis, some people feel depression or despair or anger, or all three. They grieve. They grapple with a loss of meaning. A person’s whole belief system may be called into question because “virtually every aspect of their life will be threatened by changes imposed by the [disease] and its management,” Lee has written. In a small 2011 Danish study, patients with an incurable esophageal cancer reported that after their diagnosis, their lives seemed to spin out of control. Some wondered why they had received a fatal diagnosis, and fell into despair and hopelessness. “I didn’t care about anything,” one patient said. “I had just about given up.”
In the 1970s, two Harvard researchers, Avery Weisman and J. William Worden, did a foundational study on this existential plight. Newly diagnosed cancer patients who had a prognosis of at least three months were interviewed at several different points. At first, for almost all the patients in the study, existential concerns were more important than dealing with the physical impacts of disease. The researchers found that the reckoning was jarring, but still relatively brief and uncomplicated, lasting about two to three months. For a few patients, the crisis triggered or created lasting psychological problems. A few others seemed to face the crisis, then return to a state of denial, and then double back to the crisis—perhaps more than once. In the study, the researchers describe a patient who was told her diagnosis, only to report to interviewers that she didn’t know what it was—and then make it clear she wasn’t interested in receiving a diagnosis in the near future.
Palliative-care doctors used to think that a patient was either in a state of denial or a state of acceptance, period, Rodin says. But now he and his colleagues believe people are more likely to move back and forth. “You have to live with awareness of dying, and at the same time balance it against staying engaged in life,” he says. “It’s being able to hold that duality—which we call double awareness—that we think is a fundamental task.”
Whether or not people are able to find that balance, the existential crisis doesn’t last; patients can’t remain long in a state of acute anxiety. Coyle has found in her work that later peaks of distress are not usually as severe as that first wave. “Once you’ve faced [death] like that once, it’s not new knowledge in your consciousness anymore,” she says.
The existential slap doesn’t always entail mental suffering, and medical professionals who work with the dying say there are rare cases in which patients seem to skip this phase altogether, or at least experience it in a much less painful way. “People can gradually come to the realization,” Coyle says. “No one has to go through the sudden shock of awareness.”
But for most, figuring out how to adapt to living with a life-threatening disease is a difficult but necessary cognitive process, according to Lee. When patients do emerge on the other side of the existential crisis, she finds that many are better off because of it. These patients are more likely to have a deeper compassion for others and a greater appreciation for the life that remains.
To arrive there, they have to squarely face the fact that they’re going to die. “If you’re an avoidant person, and you don’t like to think about these things, that works better when life is going well,” Rodin says. “It just doesn’t work well in this situation because reality doesn’t allow it. It’s like trying to pretend you don’t need an umbrella or something, or it’s not raining, when it’s pouring. You can do that when it’s drizzling, but eventually, you have to live with the rain.”
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
[P]ets are part of the family, so it makes sense that losing one is tough on everyone, including our children. A pet’s death may be the first time they’ve ever experienced a real loss, and as a parent, it can be difficult to know how to start a conversation about life, death, and grieving in a way they can understand, but that won’t heighten their sadness.
Last week, we put our 12-year-old dog to sleep five weeks after he was diagnosed with lymphoma. It was a brief but rapidly debilitating illness, and I wondered if my kids would understand that a dog who was quite healthy only two months ago was now gone. Surprisingly, they took it much better than I did. My 3-year-old gave me a hug, then told me, “I don’t know why you’re crying, Mom. Gus was sick, and now he’s in heaven with grandma’s dog. He’s not sad he died. He’s still happy.”
After briefly wondering if my child was a pet psychic, I realized that his logic was pretty sound. While my son would miss our dog, he knew our pup had been suffering, and he was prepared for the death. He had processed the loss faster and more easily than I did precisely because he was a kid. If you’re dealing with the loss of a family pet, here’s how to help your children process their feelings.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
By
[F]or one month this spring, my job as a senior resident in a large teaching hospital entailed racing around the hospital, managing patients who had rapidly become sicker; I wore running shoes every day. I also led every code, orchestrating a team of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and pharmacists in an effort to resuscitate patients after their hearts had stopped. Some of the very sick patients under my care had do-not-resuscitate orders, but most didn’t. For them, my team and I provided whatever treatments we could.
One night, a colleague asked me to see Mr. S, a middle-aged patient with worrisome vital signs.
Arriving at his bedside, my colleague, Dave, and I saw a sluggish, pale man — he’d been in the hospital for almost a month with life-threatening infections. He answered my questions with brief but cogent statements until he suddenly stopped moving, his eyes staring blankly at the wall. I felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one.
“Call a code blue,” I said as calmly as I could, referring to the all-hands-on-deck alert that a patient’s heart had stopped. Dave began doing chest compressions, pressing rhythmically and firmly on Mr. S’s chest, taking the place of the heart in circulating blood throughout his body. I stood at the foot of the bed as the resuscitation team rushed in. A breathing tube wouldn’t pass down Mr. S’s windpipe, so a surgeon performed a cricothyrotomy, cutting a hole in the throat so we could insert a tube to help him breathe. As we paused chest compressions to check for a pulse, 15 wide-eyed faces looked to me to tell them what to do next. Although most in attendance had been involved in attempts to resuscitate patients before, the adrenaline-fueled brutality universal to codes is nearly impossible to get used to. Mr. S’s heart still wasn’t pumping, so we continued.
A few moments later, his arms flailed, thanks to the blood the chest compressions were sending to his brain and the rest of his body. The intern who had taken over for Dave paused in alarm. Another resident reassured her this simply meant her compressions were strong, and urged her to continue pushing.
After more compressions and injections of medicines to bring up the blood pressure and restart the heart, Mr. S’s began to beat faintly. Stable for the moment, we moved him to the intensive care unit. His prognosis was grave, so his family opted against future resuscitations. Later that day, his heart stopped again — that time forever.
We may have revived Mr. S, at least for a few hours, but I’m not sure we really helped him. Were our actions what he truly wanted?
Most people whose hearts suddenly stop don’t survive. Of the more than 200,000 Americans every year who go into cardiac arrest in the hospital, only about one-quarter make it out of the hospital alive. Of those, nearly 30 percent are seriously disabled.
Doctors often don’t adequately convey these grim outcomes; many patients remain falsely optimistic, tending to overestimate their chances of surviving a cardiac arrest. And few people understand what the resuscitation process truly entails, and how these efforts often lead to a painful, undignified death. Recent research also shows that patients and caregivers tend not to be on the same page when it comes to what level of disability or pain might be acceptable to a patient in the future, including after a code.
There’s got to be a way to close these gaps.
The solution starts with a conversation between doctors and their patients about what the end of life might look like. In an effort to make these discussions more common, Medicare now allows doctors to count such discussions, known as advance care planning, as a topic worthy of a doctor’s visit — and of reimbursement under a new billing code — if patients are open to it. Since this change took effect Jan. 1, 2016, nearly 575,000 patients and 23,000 providers have participated in such reimbursed conversations. Of course, there’s plenty of room for improvement: Although that’s almost twice as many conversations as predicted by the American Medical Association, it’s only 1 percent of all people enrolled in Medicare.
It may seem ridiculous to need to pay doctors to have these conversations. Yet given the myriad demands on doctors’ time, making this conversation reimbursable puts it on equal footing with measuring blood pressure, discussing an irregular heartbeat, and other topics long considered vital parts of a doctor visit. These conversations aren’t simply something that are nice to do; they are an incredibly important part of the way patients live and die.
Yet this initiative faces opposition by lawmakers whose fundamental misunderstanding of advance care planning risks seriously harming patients. One such example is the dangerously misnamed Protecting Life Until Natural Death Act, proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) this past January. The bill calls for excluding end-of-life discussions from Medicare reimbursement, discouraging doctors from having these important conversations. That’s a problem because in the American medical system, the default position is to do everything possible to revive a patient unless he or she requests otherwise. And in reality, there’s nothing natural about a death prolonged by painful chest compressions, endless needle sticks, and a breathing tube forced down the throat, especially when such efforts are usually futile. In fact, some experts have proposed changing the term “do not resuscitate” to “allow natural death” to better reflect the realities of end-of-life care.
There’s no doubt heroic measures save some lives — but they aren’t what everyone wants. That’s why end-of-life discussions are essential for protecting patients and empowering them to make clear, well-informed decisions that let doctors do right by them. It’s absolutely vital that we keep these conversations going.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!