Ending Life Well: Conversations & Connections The Gift of End of Life Care Planning By McKenna Reinhard , End of Life Specialist
of life documents can be a gift to yourself, because you no longer have to carry the weight of what happens without these documents in place. This process is also a gift to your loved ones because you are providing them with your voice and your wishes in written form, so they don’t need to guess what you would want if you were unable to speak for yourself. Karen is also a nurse practitioner in the ICU and believes that patients who go through the process of completing their advance directives give a gift to their healthcare providers. When patients come in without completing these documents and having these conversations with their families, it is often up to the healthcare providers to try to start this process. Depending on how ill the patient is, it may not be possible to talk with the patient about what healthcare treatments they want or don’t want. However, when patients come in with these documents completed, Karen states that, “we as providers have the patient’s voice in the form of the documents, which takes away the need to guess at what treatments they might want or not want.” By being proactive, you are providing a gift to healthcare providers by allowing them to focus
A phrase that those of us on the End of Life Team here at PCOA use a lot is “end of life care planning is a gift.” However, it might not be clear how it’s a gift when it often feels like a burden or something to mark off your to-do list. This month we talked to Karen Anderson about her experience with end of life planning, personally and professionally, and why she views this process as a gift. We hope that by the end of this article we will have shed light on some of the ways that these documents can be a gift for yourself, your loved ones, and even the healthcare workers that might be taking care of you. According to Karen, when she turned fifty, she decided to go through the process of end of life planning, including completing her advance directives. While the process of completing the documents themselves was not necessarily quick or simple, she states that, “once the documents were completed and I provided copies to the important people in my life and had conversations with those people about my wishes, I felt like a weight was taken off my shoulders.” In this way, the process of completing your end
on their job—taking care of you and following your wishes—instead of making it so they also must be the ones to start these conversations or work with your loved ones to try to guess what you would have wanted. If you’re feeling inspired to give the gift of advance care planning this holiday season and want some help getting started, you can visit our website at endoflife.pcoa.org or call our helpline at (520) 790-7262 and they can get you connected with the End of Life Team.
December 2022, Never Too Late | Page 23
Pima Council on Aging
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