Prolonging Living or Prolonging Dying?

m0minmd
Mon, 08 Aug 2016 16:09:42 +0000

My dad has been gone more than 10 years now. The one thing that shocked me was that I needed to produce that DNR at every step along the way. When he was in the hospital, I worked through the details of what to do/not to do. When he was released and readmitted to his assisted living facility and (after several weeks) fell and had to be readmitted but to a different hospital, I was shocked that the DNR did not transfer. In fact, the assisted living didn’t know about the DNR. I thought they knew. Well, that’s when I made sure I literally carried the darn thing with me everywhere I went. And made sure there were copies of this thing everywhere he was. I don’t know if the laws vary from state to state. And quite frankly don’t know if they’ve changed since the mid 2000s.

The other thing was I had 4 siblings to deal with (my mom passed many years ago). 2 of them were supportive of just about any decision I made. 1 sibling thought my dad couldn’t possibly be as bad off as he was. The other thought the place where lived must have caused his issues. Gotta love family dynamics.

And the conference call feature on my cell phone. I could call each of my siblings and tell everyone the same thing at the same time so that everyone could ask questions, hear the answers, and (generally) come away with the same information. I wasn’t going to play the ‘telephone’ game where one person says one thing and it gets repeated to the next person but with parts missing and so on and so on. If anyone asked me a question separately, I found out the answer and called everyone back with the answer. Again, gotta love family dynamics. But that was the best way for me with my sibs.