In a word: yes. YES. It’s always a good time to think about what’s important to you if you cannot make your own healthcare decisions. And then you need to talk about it with your loved ones and make sure you’ve told your surrogate decision make what you want. Because the worst time to have this conversation is when it’s too late and you are intubated in the ICU and can’t talk about what you would or would not want.
When the pandemic started to hit us hard, I read several opinion pieces lamenting the fact that nurses and physicians were suddenly scrambling to write their wills and advanced directives. It should not have taken a pandemic to get us to do that – especially for those of us who work in acute care and have seen what happens when a patient cannot speak for her/himself and families disagree over the plan of care. If there is a silver lining to be found here, it is prompting a lot of people to have the difficult conversations around advanced directives. Palliative care professionals would say the same:
“Do you have any advice for the public while we’re on the topic?
It’s really important that all adults over the age of 18 who have the capacity to do so pick a health care proxy who is going to make decisions for you. Decisions about life support, about surgeries, about other treatments, amputations, other kinds of medications, dialysis. You just go to a website, you download your state’s health care proxy form. We’ve seen with this disease, it can impact someone at any age.”
The National Institute on Aging has some excellent resources on advanced healthcare planning. I encourage you to review the information and get started on your healthcare directives. It really is a gift to your loved ones because it helps alleviate some of the responsibility that surrogate decision makers face when their loved one has a directive on file and has already had a conversation about their wishes. Do it for yourself, so that your wishes are honored, and do it for your loved ones, so they won’t have to guess about what you would want if you could not make decisions for yourself. Don’t wait – get started today.
