Topics Brought Up By Conversation Group Medical Visit Patients
| Topic | Quotation |
|---|---|
| Advance directives | Advance directives are not something done once in your lifetime…. Your health changes. Your circumstances. You age. They don’t have to be something that is done only once. |
| Artificial nutrition and hydration | The main thing is to keep people comfortable. Keep them out of pain. But without eating, without food, isn’t there pain? If they don’t feed you intravenously? |
| Cardiopulmonary resuscitation | On CPR, one of the things was busted ribs…. There were several other negative aspects of getting CPR. |
| Dementia | I have a new dilemma since my wife has dementia. We both have signed Do Not Resuscitate. The question is should we also sign a Do Not Prolong Life statement? For instance, if she gets a urinary tract infection, should they give her antibiotics? |
| Emergency care | Let me ask you about the practicality of things. Let’s say you have documents but you have an emergency at home and the ambulance comes and takes you to the nearest hospital. Well, they don’t have that document. |
| Hospice care | I’m thinking of my mother, who told me in May…. She said ‘I’m ready to go. I’ve done everything in my life I want to do.’ It chokes me up when I heard this. And she was 93. She wasn’t in any pain…. And she had hospice, which she had agreed to earlier. Can you explain Hospice to me? We have a friend that has cancer and he’s getting that, and I just don’t know that much about it. |
| Life sustaining treatment | Is there a significant number who have declared I do not want life support and then changed their mind at the last moment? |
| Long-term care | I’ll finish this sentence: What matters to me at the end of life is… I’ve had some experience. I just put down no Nursing Home. Because I had an experience of two months with assisted living and then I had two months in rehab…. And so I indicated in my own family that it is really the last place I want to be. |
| Organ donation | As you approach our age, are there any organs that are still desirable? |
| Palliative care | I think we tend to agree that at this stage we would basically go with palliative care… to make sure she is comfortable. |
CPR = cardiopulmonary resuscitation.