Last summer when I was admitted to the hospital with the Norovirus, one of the questions a nurse asked was, “Do you want to be resuscitated?”
I replied, “No.” One of the plastic bracelets she snapped around my wrist bore the letters DNR. I didn’t feel like I had a life threatening illness but I was in Intensive Care. When my husband was allowed into my room, I told him about my decision.
His first response was, “You can’t mean that.”
We talked it over. Twenty-five years ago, we’d filled out various end of life papers including compliance with Illinois’s Living Will Act that we didn’t want heroic measures to keep us alive. Decisions in the abstract are easy but when it comes down to possibly happening , it’s different. I don’t have a death wish as long as I continue to enjoy my roles as wife, mother, grandmother and writer. I’m in good health but I have been living with one lung since 1980. We had friends that were subjected to fruitless, extreme measures for bodies that were worn out and they died anyway. Neither of us wanted that.
From the time I was a little child reciting the prayer, “If I should die before I wake…” to my DNR bracelet, I’ve known I would die someday, but I always emphasized ‘someday’. When our oldest daughter was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, my husband and I faced the reality that it’s not a question of if but when death would arrive.
Have you thought about your wishes and filled filled out the necessary papers to comply?