Received this date:
Dear Linkmeister,
Your Primary Care Provider has referred you to attend a group meeting on Advance Health Care Directives. We would like to invite you to attend this meeting at the Ambulatory Care Clinic, 3rd Floor Conference Room, on Friday, Oct. 24, 2014 at 10:00AM.
The Advance Health Care Directive allows you to give instructions about your health care and to name someone else to make your health care decisions if you are unable to make the decisions for yourself.
Gulp. What do they know about my health that they haven’t told me yet?
Not a thing, except the fact that you’re old enough to be on Medicare. Kaiser made me fill out an advance directive before my last knee surgery, just in case. I’m still not sure how useful ADs are, because if they (or someone who knows what’s in them) aren’t HANDY when the ambulance comes, they won’t be observed. Ambulance crews are under orders to try to resuscitate everyone unless someone presents them with written instructions to the contrary. So you get an old lady with a DNR (do not resuscitate) on record somewhere, whose body is put through all kids of stuff after a stroke because nobody at the site where she fell knew about the DNR.
This is actually a really important conversation; I’ve read that we could solve a great deal of the medical cost overruns in this country if people were allowed to die the way they say they want to – peacefully at home – instead of in a hospital hooked up to tubes and machines. But it does take a great deal of mental effort to think clearly about one’s own death.