Posts Tagged ‘living will’

Nov 6, 2012The Cost of Dying: Simple Act of Feeding Poses Painful Choices

by Lisa M. Krieger
The Oakland Tribune
November 2, 2012

A small plastic tube is all that stands between survival and starvation.

The benefits of a feeding tube — helping elders who have forgotten how to eat — seem so obvious that it is used on one-third of demented nursing home residents, contributing to a growing device market worth $1.64 billion annually.

Except it does little to help. And it can hurt.

Decades after the tube achieved widespread use for people with irreversible dementia, some families are beginning to say no to them, as emerging research shows that artificial feeding prolongs, complicates and isolates dying.

The tale of the feeding tube, known as percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG), is the latest installment of “Cost of Dying,” a series exploring how our technological ability to stave off death creates dilemmas unimaginable decades ago, when we died younger and more quickly.

Food is how we comfort those we love; when all other forms of communication have vanished, feeding remains a final act of devotion. So the easy availability of feeding tubes forces a wrenching choice upon families: Do we say yes, condemning a loved one to dependency on a small plastic tube in their stomach? Or do we say no, consenting to their death?

Tubes are useful as a nutritional tool for patients struggling with a critical illness, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, or recovering from stroke, cancer or anorexia.

But if no turnaround is in sight — particularly in elders with progressive neurological illness — they can be a dreadful mistake, medical researchers now say. More

Oct 22, 2012Making Their Wishes Known: Advance Directives Ease Fear

by Carol Harrison
Times-Standard
October 21, 2012

Amy Cirincione hails from a large Italian family, the kind that flocks to the hospital when one of their own is an emergency admission.

“The way we deal with crisis is yelling,” Cirincione said on the last Saturday in August. “I filled out an advance directive to help my husband deal with my family.”

Laughter, smiles and nods filled the Hospice of Humboldt annex where Cirincione is the director of social services. For the past year, she’s used humor, experience and knowledge to help almost 75 people plan for the end of life by filling out an advance directive.

”Anyone over 18 should have one,” she said while setting up for the free, two-hour workshop in August. “You can be hit by a bus or have routine surgery with complications. You need to make sure your wishes are known.” More

Sep 25, 2012Doctors Are Practicing Irrational Medicine at the End of Life

By Monica Williams-Murphy, MD
KevinMD.com
September 22, 2012

I just took care of a precious little lady, Ms. King (not her real name), who reminded me that, too often, we doctors are practicing irrational medicine at the end of life. We are like cows walking mindlessly in the same paths; only because we have always done things the same way, never questioning ourselves. What I mean is that we are often too focused on using our routine pills and procedures used to address abnormal lab values or abnormal organ function, to rightly perceive what might be best for the whole person, or even what may no longer be needed. Our typical practice habits may in fact become inappropriate medical practice at life’s end.

Ms. King was a case in point: She was a 92-year-old nursing home patient on hospice for metastatic breast cancer. Ms King had been transferred to the ER for a sudden drop in blood sugar, presumably due to her oral diabetes medication. Her appetite had apparently been trailing off, as is common at the end of life, and her medication appeared to have become “too strong.” Her glucose level had been corrected by EMS during her trip from the nursing home to the Hospital, so when I came into see Ms King she was at her ‘baseline.’

I opened the door to bed 24 and a grinning little white-haired lady peered at me from over her sheet. “Hi,” she said greeting me first.

“Hi, Ms King,” I smiled back at her and picked up her hand.

She reached over with her free hand to pat me on my forearm, “You sure are a cute little doctor,” she said smiling.

I couldn’t hold back a little laughter. “Well, you sure are a cute patient too,” I smiled and winked at her.

She winked back at me.

“Wow, this is the most pleasant 90-year-old I have cared for in a while,” I thought to myself.

As we chatted it became clear to me that she had some mild dementia but had no pain or complaints at the time. She just said, “I think I had a ‘spell’” ( a “southernism” for some type of unusual and undefined episode of feeling ill or fainting); and “I’m not hungry” when I offered her food.

Leaving her room still smiling after our pleasant exchange, I went back to look at her medical record from the nursing home and two things immediately struck me:

1. She was on 20 medications, only about half of which seemed needed or appropriate to me. For instance, if someone is expected to die from cancer in the next 6 months (which is why she was on hospice care), why should that person take a cholesterol pill every day?

Is it going to change her outcome? No.
Will it add to her comfort? No.
Could it possibly cause unnecessary harm? Yes.
So, why is she on this medication? No rational reason that I can think of, other than mere habit on the part of the doctor.
- Doctor habit: See an abnormal lab value ( i.e. elevated cholesterol) = give a pill to correct it. While this is a fine default among the rest of the population, this type of unconscious medical practice at the end of life is contributing to wasteful drain of precious and scarce Medicare and Medicaid dollars. We cows (doctors), need to depart from these types of paths. If the usual pill, practice or procedure does not have any benefit for the dying person, if the typical treatment doesn’t create comfort, or may actually harm this person, then DON’T DO IT! Get off this path!

2. She was on hospice care but her order sheet read, “Full Code.” I can never figure this one out. If you or your family member enters hospice care this means that you generally accept that your time on this earth is limited, specifically to less than 6 months or so. Thus, it is irrational to ask for chest compressions or shocks or artificial life support measures when your expected end comes. Right? Didn’t you sign up for hospice because you were wishing for a peaceful, natural death? Well, not everyone agrees with me, so I called Ms. King’s power of attorney to clarify this point, it was her son, Mr. King.

Mr King was a pleasant man who said that he was unable to come to the hospital because he himself had suffered a stroke. After I explained the full code vs Do Not Resuscitate/Allow Natural Death pathway, he said, “Oh No! she never wanted all of that life support stuff. Both of us want what you said, ‘ a natural death.’” More

Sep 18, 2012Going Gently Into That Good Night

By Daniel Krieger
Narratively
September 18, 2012

If you’re dying and don’t care to wait around for death, you can always book your own appointment. One simple way to do this would be to stop eating and drinking; another would be to stop life-sustaining medicine or devices. Assuming you can decide on your own, both of these methods are good and kosher as far as the law goes. A third approach, however, ventures into a grayer area of legal and ethical terrain—quaffing a lethal cocktail. In the business of ending your life, the means matter a lot more than the final result.

These were three things my mother, Ann Krieger, was pondering when she reached the final leg of her terminal illness last year, a month before Mother’s Day. After several years of fighting colon cancer, her doctor broke the news that the cancer had spread and the treatment was no longer working. There was no more they could do.

“You’ve got months, not weeks,” he said.

“What should I do?” she asked. “Should I end it now?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t want to do that.”

Actually, my mother kind of did, but the doctor referred her to hospice and gave her information about palliative care, a mode of treatment that relieves the pain of patients with serious illnesses. But in my mother’s case, the physical distress was less acute than the existential. Coming to terms with the fact that you’re going to die is elusive. For some people, like her, an attempt to manage the logistics could make it seem more doable. She and my father had given this some thought and had very specific ideas about how they wanted their end-of-life matters handled.

Six years earlier, horrified by what was taking place with Terri Schiavo in Florida, they sat my sister and me down to give us instructions. Should it ever come down to it, my parents told us, they wanted no artificial resuscitation, experimental procedures, machines or IVs—none of that stuff. They just wanted us to make sure they would be allowed to die naturally. “The idea,” my father explained to me recently, “is to be pain-free, comfortable and not go through a lot of unnecessary, costly and painful treatments which won’t help anyway.”

My mother had first-hand experience with this 21 years ago when her mom, my grandma Trixie, who was in perfect health at 85, was struck by a hit-and-run driver near her home in Queens. The doctors at New York Hospital said she had severe trauma in her brainstem and wouldn’t wake up. She was hooked up to a ventilator. More

Sep 10, 2012What Are Living Wills and How Can They Benefit People With Alzheimer’s Disease?

By Esther Heerema, MSW
About.com
August 30, 2012

What Is a Living Will?

A living will is a document that contains your wishes for what kind of medical care you desire and how aggressive you want the healthcare providers to be in caring for you. Some living wills include the option for you to designate a medical power of attorney in the same document as you indicate your various healthcare choices. Others are drawn up in separate documents. This can vary by state and by document. Note that not all states will recognize a living will but regardless, it is a helpful tool to communicate your preferences.

Why Is a Living Will an Important Document for People With Alzheimer’s?

A living will is a good document for everyone to have, but especially so in Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. Because dementia is progressive, you can anticipate that the ability to make decisions, including medical ones, will deteriorate. A living will provides you with the opportunity to outline ahead of time what your wishes are and how you want your medical decisions to be made. More

Newer Entries

Older Entries