Every patient should have an advance directive. It gives you a voice in decisions about your medical care when you are unconscious or too ill to communicate. As long as you are able to express your own decisions, your advance directive will not be used and you can accept or refuse any medical treatment you like. Nevertheless, if you become seriously ill, you may lose the ability to participate in decisions about your own treatment.
Helen’s comment:
When my husband was dying of cancer, he became very short of breath. The doctors didn’t want to him on a mechanical ventilator, but because there was no advance directive order in his medical chart, his doctor asked me to sign a DNR order. I sat there and thought about it for as long as I could. My husband had not been conscious for a week and was in tremendous pain. Though he had been sick for more than a year, we never wanted to discuss this type of situation. I sat there, looking at him. He was perspiring and gasping for air.
I couldn’t see that putting him on a ventilator would help him, but I didn’t want him to die. I eventually signed the DNR order and the doctors gave him morphine to make him more comfortable. He died later that night.That was the most painful, agonizing decision I ever made.
It is imperative that we appoint a health care agent or someone, maybe a family member, with the authority to speak for us when are unable to make our own medical decisions at any time of illness. We should tell them what we want to happen in this situation. It is unfair and a painful burden for them to have to make the decision for you.