Prolonging Living or Prolonging Dying?

teriwtt
Mon, 08 Aug 2016 16:45:08 +0000

@Nrdsb4 - so sorry for your loss. I think your stepmom’s experience is a perfect example of how some things aren’t black and white. So when I hear people say, “I don’t want to be put on life support,” I wonder if they’ve indicated all the ways they would indeed welcome temporary life support if they knew it was temporary. Problem is, medicine is often an art as much as a science and health care professionals don’t always know whether someone will be able to come off of life support. This past winter, my 69-year old brother had a massive MI and his heart stopped on the way into the cath lab. He ended up on pretty much every kind of life support there was, and he was on it for over two weeks. There were many hours it was thought he would not pull through and all the odds were stacked against him, but he did, and I’m sure his family is grateful for all the interventions taken by the health care team (I am somewhat estranged from him - I’m not in their inner circle, so I don’t know details other than what one of my other brothers shared with me). So yes, it’s easy to complain about all the money spent on end-of-life care, but my brother’s experience shows it’s not always black and white and lots of variable feed into decisions, some that are impossible to predict until that moment when you are faced with that decision.

Another significant part of this issue is our society’s unwillingness to have these hard discussions with our family around death. One of the most obvious ways we (those who have worked in hospice) observe this is in the difficulty people just have with the language. People are hesitant to use the word die, dying and death. I can’t tell you the number of times on my Facebook wall (actually three times in the last week) that people have announced the death of a parent or pet, and did not use the word died. It’s because using other words (passed, gone, dying, not with us any longer) softens the event, as if an attempt is made to deny the harsh reality that none of us escapes dying. By continuing to avoid using the hard terms, we perpetuate the concept that talking about dying is taboo. I don’t just blame patients for this; there are plenty of health care professionals who are uncomfortable talking about dying, and if we want our society to move forward in initiating these difficult conversations, we need to get the language right.

I get, that these discussions are extremely difficult, about as difficult as any discussions we can have, but until we change our language, it will be just as difficult to face the reality that we don’t live forever and make some of these hard decisions.