She should wear a DNR bag over her head.
Posted on 07/13/2008 11:05:37 AM PDT by wagglebee
When it comes to physician-assisted dying, Teresa Grove wears her politics on her refrigerator door — and on her chest.
Grove works as a hospice nurse. For the past 14 years, she has been involved with the Oregon group Compassion in Dying (now Compassion and Choices), which sponsored the 1994 Oregon Death With Dignity Act. She chaired its board of directors for 10 years and still serves as a client volunteer.
An advance directive, also known as a Physician’s Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment, is affixed to her refrigerator. The tattoo on her chest — impossible to be missed by emergency medical responders — reads DNR. Do Not Resuscitate.
Grove began her nursing career in the intensive-care unit of Physicians and Surgeons Hospital in northwest Portland. She said that experience opened her eyes to the need for a law that would let the dying take control of the circumstances of their death.
“There are some patients for whom critical care is appropriate,” Grove said. “But some people in multisystem failure will never get out of critical care.”
She found it “challenging, satisfying” to work with those who had a chance of recovering, but less so to insert gastric tubes in helpless stroke victims.
In 1995, that professional dilemma became personal when her 70-year-old mother underwent quadruple bypass surgery.
“She did OK, but then she stopped breathing and her heart stopped beating. After that, we knew that some of her brain was gone. … My last labor of love for my mother was to turn off her breathing machine.”
Fortunately, her mother had filled out an advance directive and had discussed it with her family. But a law like Oregon’s, allowing the dying to choose the time and place of their death, was not available to her.
“If you personally feel strongly that you don’t want what you feel is a loss of dignity, people should have that legal choice,” Grove said. “They shouldn’t have to sneak around someone’s back like in the other 49 states.”
Grove, who lives in the hills north of Camas, has witnessed the deaths of six patients who died with help from Oregon’s Death With Dignity Law since she began working for Kaiser Hospice last August.
“The experiences I’ve had with people who have used this law have been inspiring,” she said. “In most cases, the family is nearby. The patient is rarely in tears. What happens when people are dying is they start withdrawing from what is around them. They focus on getting emotional business done. They focus on what is beyond, and when they go, all the pieces are aligned.”
If a person lives their life with dignity, it doesn't make a bit of difference what their appearance is when they die. A person DOES NOT acquire dignity by controlling their method of death.
Under this woman's bizarre theory, Hitler had dignity and Jesus Christ didn't.
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These guys are playing sleight of hand with words.
Originally the group was “Compassion and Dying” and now it is “Compassion and Choices”. If they are so proud of advocating dying, why did they change the name?
This reminds me of the name of NARAL. Originally, it was the “National Abortion Rights Action League”, or N.A.R.A.L. Now they are called “NARAL - Pro Choice America”. That group doesn’t want to emphasize that the first “A” in NARAL stands for abortion.
Evil always has a million excuses for its acts. Good doesn’t need long-winded explanations.
She better not come to Iowa.
Around here, people see ‘DNR’ they think ‘Department of Natural Resources’.
She should wear a DNR bag over her head.
My reason is my experience with my father. My father was on kidney dialysis. He decided to go off of it which meant he would die. Well once he started swelling up, he told me that he wanted to go back on treatment. I called his doctor, who told me that he had already made up his mind and that was that.
Well guess what, I told that doctor that he better meet us at the hospital. The idea that a patient cannot change their mind is the problem.
Yes my father did finally pass away, but not then. I think that the arrogance of some members of the medical profession makes them the wrong people to be involved in this.
Exactly!
The ONLY “choice” these groups EVER seem to favor is killing an innocent human being.
Some 30,000 Americans commit suicide every year without manipulatively dragging our major medical, legal, and political structures into it for "assistance" or "permission."
I would argue that it's a wicked and/or a pathetic thing to commit suicide "freelance" --- though only God can judge in the case of the clinically depressed or otherwise impaired. But that doesn't even compare to the rotten evil of "legal" or "assisted" suicide where you manipulate and corrupt your own friends and family, and the major institutions of society, as your accomplices.
Doctors, nurses, and hospice workers should not be pulled into the picture as accessories to the deed, because they are, and should be, unalterably committed to the patient's health: and nobody is healthier dead.
Lawyers, judges, and politicians should not be implicated in suicide because they're supposed to be dedicated to our rights and liberties: and death effectively snuffs ALL rights and all liberties.
I have never quite understood why those would-be suicides who say their #1 value is personal autonomy, don't just do it --- like those other thousands of self-respecting autonomous suicides* --- and leave the rest of us out of it.
* (Hoping the irony here is apparent.)
We had just the opposite experience. My FIL’s living will said no artificial breathing or feeding tube (he did not oppose hydration and medication.) He was 93 and had a massive stroke, plus the complication of pneumonia. My husband insisted that his father’s wishes be carried out (he had Health Care Surrogate POA) and asked that they not insert a feeding tube or put him on a ventilator.
The pressure to do both, coming from the “specialty hospital” he had been transferred to was fierce. We later learned that he was the only one in the hospital that did not have a feeding tube and ventilator. We continued meds, hydration and tried to feed him. He survived a few weeks, but everyday we faced pressure to put him on machines, which he had specifically dictated that he did not want.
To this day, I don’t know why the pressure was being exerted by the physicians at the hospital, I can only surmise that it was for monetary gain.
Then you get the kind of stuff that's going on in the Netherlands, where doctors go behind the family's and the patient's back to kill the patient to free up their bed for somebody else. Sometimes in the case of folks who aren't even terminal.
And once somebody's dead, that's that. You can't change your mind. In your FIL's case, you had the opportunity to change your minds (even if your minds were made up).
There is absolute no legal validity to a tattooed DNR. It might stand for Donna Nicole Regan. Dolphins Need Rights. Deadly Nurses Rule.
And she knows that. All nurses do.
Actually it wasn’t our wishes we were following, it was his. Everyone needs a Living Will and also a legal document appointing a Heathcare Surrogate or Healthcare POA.
We heard Everett Koop once discuss the Karen Anne Quinlan case. He cautioned in the age of every increasing life sustaining measures, we each need to weigh what measures we want and get it in writing...a Living Will, in some cases, may not be an enforceable document, it just expresses one’s wishes, but a Health Care Surrogate see that one’s wishes are followed.
The problem with a bureaucratized death system is that people can get ensnared in the bureaucracy against their will. “Whoops, we thought we had a record to kill him, but it was really the other Mr. Smith.”
Imagine the lawsuits if an heir hires a hacker to change Rescue to DNR in a state database as grandpa goes in for heart bypass, or stating “yes, if I’m sick, kill me” that no one notices until an ER admission is made. Murder without laying a hand on someone.
bump
And there are doctors - like the one who was mentioned up thread - who want to enforce that Living Will EVEN IF THE PATIENT CHANGES HIS MIND.
If the patient is unconscious, but has changed his mind, he is then in a world of hurt. As long as the patient has family who are able to make decisions in the circumstances presenting, that's the best bet.
But then you have creepy events like the Schiavo case, where the courts were willing to rely on a hearsay statement by an estranged husband who was anxious for the wife to die so he could marry his live-in girlfriend (and keep the PI settlement $$$) -- who wants to leave their fate in the hands of somebody like that?
It's a slippery slope, and it's best not to take that first step, no matter how "compassionate" it seems. Doctors and nurses need to stick to the business of healing, not get a sideline of killing folks. Wouldn't you be suspicious of a doctor who ran a funeral home on the side?
Life and death decisions, brought to you by the folks who 'run' the post office?
“A person DOES NOT acquire dignity by controlling their method of death.”
Guess you’ll really find out when you die. Unless you’ve set by the bedside of a dying person, you don’t have a clue.
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