Would You Want This To Happen To You?

Have you ever been in a hospital when over the intercom you’ve heard “Code Blue, code blue”? Have you seen the organized chaos that occurs in a room when a patient’s heart has stopped beating and the medical team is doing everything they can to revive the patient? When I was the on-call chaplain at a trauma hospital I saw it only too often. Sometimes the patient’s heart was restarted only to have him remain in a vegetative state, sometimes patients actually got better, sometimes all the team’s efforts were in vain. Or were they? I suppose it depends on how each of us as an individual defines the sanctity of life, the quality of life. Me? I don’t want to be on a ventilator as I slowly die. Of course, I hope no one has to make that decision about me any time soon!

One of the hardest things I ever had to do was tell the doctors that they could not operate on my non-responsive father, that they could not insert a breathing tube, and that we wanted hospice to care for him from that point on. I knew he wasn’t going to get better. My mother on the other hand said, “It doesn’t seem right to just let him die.” I think she reversed her thinking on that a year later when she was sent 911 to the hospital and had a breathing tube inserted instead of being allowed to die peacefully at her residence. These aren’t things we’d talked about, except 20 years earlier when my dad had asked if my sister would “pull the plug” rather than letting him “become a vegetable.” It’s not an easy conversation to have, but it’s an important one.

If you need help having the conversation, check out http://wapo.st/1pFpi4Q

We’ve gotten so used to television and to seeing things demonstrated that sometimes words alone aren’t enough. Depending on personalities and family dynamics, having a neutral party present the information can be more comfortable for everyone involved. You can help yourself, help your family by considering in advance whether you’d want chest compressions, a breathing tube, a feeding tube, or other life sustaining (death prolonging) measures. Think about it, talk about it, write it down and have a copy of your advance medical directive placed in your record at your doctor’s office. Then you have one less thing to worry about in case of emergency.