I learned about the idea of posting the DNR on the refrigerator when my father entered hospice at home care earlier this year. I had no idea that was the standard prior to that.
FFS just read the article.
It took a call to Grace’s disability attorney and numerous conversations with hospital attorneys to come to an agreement that allowed Grace to have her sister in her room as her advocate.
ETA: @Dewey_Finn 2 posts up.
DNI/R, and also a complete medical history, physician contact info, and current medication list. Separate envelopes if you’re part of a couple.
My mother carried hers with her everywhere she went; and made a point of telling every medical facility she used about it. (It was also posted on the refrigerator that she had one and where it was.)
Some facilites, however, apparently require a different type – when she was admitted to a nursing home after a fall near the end of her life (and they finally admitted she had dementia) the home was very relieved when I showed up to sign their DNR form for her with no argument. She’d been utterly clear about it for the twenty years since my father’s slow hooked-up death.
While the names weren’t visible, I saw them add my mother’s to a whole stack of such forms. Frail old people don’t often respond well at all to standard resuscitation methods. I eventually needed also to repeat for them her no-feeding-tube decision – and she also had to repeat it, though she could barely talk at the time.
What every adult can and should get, no matter how young and healthy, is a health care proxy that specifically authorizes another person and a backup person to make such decisions for you. Talk with them thoroughly first so they have as good an idea as possible what you want – and also to try to make sure that they’ll honor it. It’s not an easy thing to do, but sometimes it needs doing.
We had all had the discussions regarding EOL, so we knew what her wishes were, but she refused to actually fill out the paperwork, because she insisted (even though she was on O2 and the pulmonologist literally told her to get her affairs straight) that she was still fine.
In my sister’s more frustrated moments (she did have medical POA), she would call me to vent. She would refer to our mother as Cleopatra, the queen of denial.
How drunk do you have to be to rummage through cars (and fall asleep in one) in a police department parking lot.
Ahhh, thank you! I was assuming it was your sister (and was wondering why they’d named her Miss Cleo…).
Surely everyone here has made a minor cooking mistake using the wrong ingredients?
Patterson said Wednesday she splurged on expensive ingredients and researched ideas to find “something special” to serve. She deviated from her chosen recipe to improve the “bland” flavor, she said.
She believed she was adding dried fungi bought from an Asian supermarket from a container in her pantry, she told the court.
The lesson is that cute little in-family jokes and nicknames mean nothing to outsiders.
Sorry about that. I was sure that I had heard that particular piece of snark before, and it was well known. Otherwise I would have clarified.
Is she claiming the Asian market sold her mushrooms that turned out to be poisonous? And if her story is true, why didn’t she get sick, too?
That seems a bit harsh. I suspected Cleopatra was mom, although Queen of denial would never occur to me.
What had me baffled is that, having been married to a lawyer, this:
can only mean she has a written DNI/DNR form appropriate to her state of residence, it’s fully signed and notarized, and her attorney, her important family members, her attending physician, and the hospital all have copies and know they have copies. And agree to implement its contents.
But this
says Mom (assumedly Cleopatra) didn’t have one. But maybe had a vague desire in that general direction.
Hint: if #2 is true, #1 is not ironclad.
Out in the world, not just in this instant family, there are a lot of people who are in Cleopatra’s case for whatever reasons: have decided, but have not written that down. That is a very bad place to be. It all but ensures your carefully considered wishes will not be followed. Don’t be that person. Please.
Yes, please don’t be that person.
Said as a nurse retired from 42 years of taking care of people, many on end of life trajectories, from newborns to those in their 10th decade. Nurses and doctors can only do (or, as importantly, not do) what is legal, not what we’re told “this is what they want” second hand.
To clarify: My mother did have an ironclad DNI/DNR. It was on file with her Doctor. She resisted having one because she was in denial (hence Cleopatra as Queen of Denial) as to how sick she was. My sister and our father finally talked her into getting it filled out and signed. When my father took her to the ER, they intubated her, because the ER is not the doctor’s office, so they did not have a copy. My father asked my brother to get the copy from the fridge and bring it to the ER.
Mrs Magill and I have our forms filled out and filed with the state. My sister and our father have their forms filed with their doctors. (Different states - different rules) My father also has a copy flied with the facility he is moving to. None of us want to be “that guy.”
She believed she was adding dried fungi bought from an Asian supermarket from a container in her pantry, she told the court.
“Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well,” she told her lawyer, Colin Mandy. Patterson had foraged wild mushrooms for years, she told the court Tuesday, and had put some in her pantry weeks before the deaths. …
The accused said she believes she was spared the worst effects of the poisoned meal because she self-induced vomiting shortly after her lunch guests left. She had binged on most of a cake and then made herself throw up — a problem she said she had struggled with for decades.
Patterson also said she believes she had eaten enough of the meal to cause her subsequent diarrhea. She then sought hospital treatment but unlike her lunch guests, she quickly recovered.
So to sum up:
She’s been foraging for mushrooms for years, and managed to never kill herself in the process.
She had some dried mushrooms in an unlabeled container in her pantry that, unbeknownst to her, were one of the deadliest ingested poisons known to man.
She coincidentally never happened to eat those deadly mushrooms herself.
She also keeps mushrooms she bought from a market in a different unlabeled container.
She lied to a group of people with whom she’s not on very good terms to get them to come eat dinner at her house.
She just happened to serve those people the deadly mushrooms that she was storing for some reason and had never partaken of herself.
She just happened to have induced vomiting in herself right after the meal.
Despite that being a common habit of hers, she’s so overweight that she’s planning on getting weight-loss surgery.
She attempted to destroy all of the evidence for the above because she thought it made her look guilty.
Yep, there’s definitely room for reasonable doubt, there.
Thank you. Now I understand. Makes sense, and a combo of bad luck and bad timing gave a bad outcome. I’m sorry Mom & family had to suffer through all that.
Sorry to beat a difficult topic into the ground.
It could happen to anyone
‘The fruit was poisoned.’
That’s a spoiler; so if you don’t already know, don’t look it up. You might want to see the movie someday.
I may have lost track of the conversation; in which movie was there poisoned fruit?