When clients ask me about Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders or ending life by stopping life support with an Advance Health Care Directive, I like to respond with a story about a client who had a stroke a few years ago. She was taken to a local hospital, where she went into a coma.
Usually this is the end of the story. The patient dies while in the coma, and we administer his or her trust or start a probate. But this woman's husband was stubborn. He didn't give up hope, and he didn't use her Advance Health Care Directive to stop life support. Instead, the husband went to the hospital every day, and sat at his wife's bedside most of the day, talking to her, or sometimes just sitting there. Could she hear him? I don't know. When visiting hours ended, the nurses would shoo the husband out, but when they weren't looking, he would come back, and sit at his wife's side a while longer.
This went on for nearly three months, and the husband was there every day. He never stopped hoping and he also never used the Advance Health Care Directive that his wife had signed a couple of years earlier.
Then one afternoon the wife started waking up. The husband summoned the nurses, who called the doctors, and within a few hours the wife was fully conscious. The coma was over and she left the hospital a week later. She lived a normal life for another three years before dying of an illness not related to the stroke or the coma.
The point of this story is that although an Advance Health Care Directive is one of the most important documents in your estate plan, it can be misused by using it too quickly to stop medical treatment. Furthermore, a DNR is an often misunderstood document that can prevent useful medical care in an emergency. If you life in a place where the residents are encouraged to have DNRs, talk to your physician about the problems that DNRs can cause.
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