living wills

Additional Living Will Pointers

The Onion provides a few Living Will pointers I hadn’t thought of, but will now factor into my surgery preparation plans. Among them:

Leave at least one reasonably flattering photo for the press. This point cannot be emphasized enough.

Explain in no uncertain terms that, should you die and return as a zombie, loved ones must shoot you in the head without hesitation.

Research medical life-support technology and specify whether you’d prefer to be hooked up to a Danninger Continuous Passive Motion device, an Emerson suction unit, or a Slushee machine.

Comatose people have been shown to exhibit a brainstem-level response to music, so prepare a decade’s worth of mix tapes in advance.

One thing I’m actually doing is the last one… I’m putting together a post-recovery playlist of soothing music to listen to in the hospital on my iPod, after reading that soothing music can help relieve pain.

Continue ReadingAdditional Living Will Pointers

Living Wills

Stephanie and I met with an attorney last night to arrange to get living wills. She’ll draw them up and then send them to us next week. She charges $230 an hour (wow!) and it should take her a couple of hours to get it done. Ouch. But it’s better than the alternative.

Here in Indiana, living wills don’t address the condition of persistent vegetative state, which is the situation Terri Schiavo is in. Indiana living wills cover only terminal conditions where extra-ordinary care would be taken to prolong an unquestioned terminal condition.

So I’ll only be able to specify my wishes legally in that case. So let me say it here, so there’s no question or mistake — if I were in a persistent vegetative state where I had no brain activity and a large portion of my brain had atrophied, like in the case of Terri Schiavo, I would rather be taken off life supporting measures and allowed to cross over peacefully into the afterlife, instead of lingering indefinitely.

Continue ReadingLiving Wills

In honor of me getting my living will this afternoon…

Some bittersweet political humor on the subject of living wills, shared on the occasion of me getting a living will in preparation for my upcoming heart surgery.

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published March 27, 2005

Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events (Terri Schiavo) to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here’s what mine says:

  • In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semi-existence. Fifteen years wouldn’t be long enough for me.
  • I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.
  • I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.
  • I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.
  • I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.
Continue ReadingIn honor of me getting my living will this afternoon…