Does someone know your wishes if you’re unable to communicate to medical staff in an emergency? There’s something you can do to change that. Photo: SDI Productions.
If you are hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow – heaven forbid – and need life-saving treatment, does anyone know how much medical intervention you would want? Or wouldn’t want?
Have you shared with anyone what your wishes would be for treatment in an emergency when you can’t speak for yourself?
If you have a terminal illness, would your family know your end-of-life plans?
If you answer no to any of these, then it’s time to sit your nearest and dearest down and have a serious conversation about your wishes.
It’s called advance care planning and even if you don’t consider yourself to be old, everyone should be talking about it, regardless of age or health.
In fact, experts say that ideally, you should start planning when you’re healthy, before there’s an urgent need for decisions to be made at a time when you can’t communicate your choices.
If you need an excuse to have what you may feel is a confronting conversation, then take the opportunity during Advance Care Planning Week (16 to 22 March) which appropriately has the theme Your story, your choice.
The Federal Government’s Advance Care Planning Australia makes it as simple as it can be, even offering up conversation starters if you feel awkward about raising the topic.
But in all honesty, you have control over the rest of your life, why wouldn’t you want control over your health (or death) when things become critical and your loved ones have to guess the extent of treatment you would want to stay alive – or perhaps wouldn’t want.
My sister and I have had this conversation with Maggie the matriarch, whose Alzheimer’s has progressed to the stage where she now lives in an aged care home (with wonderful staff).
When she moved in it was a requirement to have an advanced care directive (basically a “living will”) and although we figured we knew Mum well enough to fill in the document ourselves, we still felt we needed to have a discussion and confirm those decisions with her.
After all, this is the woman who more than a decade ago had signed her body over to the University of Wollongong and told us not to have a funeral service, just a “bloody great party”.
She was so organised that she had our contact details in obvious places in her car, home, purse, handbag – “just in case”.
Alas, Alzheimer’s has robbed her of that rational part of her brain. Not only had she forgotten about the body donation bit, her answers indicated that she would be OK to be kept alive by any means necessary, even if she could no longer function without human or mechanical help.
You have to trust me on this, but her answers were so far from all the previous pre-Alzheimer’s discussions we ever had with Mum that it was like discussing it with a stranger.
As we became more and more bewildered by this apparent about-turn, my wonderful, calm sister stepped in.
“While you might think you feel OK about not being able to talk, eat, drink or even breathe by yourself when there is no chance of recovery, think about how we, your daughters, might feel about seeing you like that? About how your grandchildren might feel?”
The thought must have triggered the old Maggie – “oh gawd, I couldn’t bear being like that, just shoot me”. (It’s OK folks, we wouldn’t even know where to find a gun).
Our family has never really shied away from those difficult conversations so my sister and I were fully confident that we knew what Mum would want for her end of life plans.
But the point is, we should have completed her advanced care plan a few years ago when she was healthy and in full control of her mind and body. At least that way it would have been written down in black and white.
That’s even more reason not to wait until you are “old” or sick. An emergency can happen any time and in the midst of grief, worry and stress, trying to make life and death decisions without knowing the wishes of a loved one is an added burden.
If a person’s preferences aren’t known, doctors may use treatments they wouldn’t have wanted.
Sadly too many people avoid talking about unpleasant things like death and dying, as if speaking about them will make them happen.
Starting the conversation is the first step to making sure your wishes or someone else’s are known and respected.
If one tough conversation can avoid the stress of trying to guess what a person might want in their most critical hour of need, isn’t it worth it?
If you’d like some helpful “conversation starters”, or more free advice on how to prepare an advance care plan, visit Advance Care Planning Australia.
