Without waiting for the federal government to do it for us, we seniors should put two-person death panels — ourselves and our doctors — into action to plan for the inevitable. The agenda for the panel meeting is to create a POLST: Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment.
The panel will consider such things as whether the senior member of the team wants to be put on a mechanical breathing machine or feeding tube and have fluids dripping into his system.
Once the doctor has enumerated and described end-of-life choices and decisions have been made, the POLST is signed by both and becomes a part of the patient’s medical records. A POLST isn’t meant to take the place of the advanced directives all of us are asked to make when we become patients in a hospital or a well-run physician’s clinic. They are supplemental to it and are more specific than most advance directives, or living wills.
They are important because, as a California physician ob-served, “more than 75 percent of people will be unable to make some or all of their own medical decisions at the end of life, but we don’t prepare patients and families to deal with this situation and it is frightening and difficult for them to know what to do.”
A POLST is a medical order created reflecting the specific decisions made by the patient and the physician. It can limit the amount of medical intervention desired — or it can direct the physician and the hospital to do everything within their power to keep the patient alive for as long as medical science allows.
AS A SOMETIME writer and diligent reader of obituaries and of reports of accidents and injuries from them, I submit that no one is too young to have a well thought-out POLST in his or her medical file. Hardly a month goes by that The Register fails to report a tragedy that led to critical injury that raised the questions a POLST answers clearly with decisions made before tragic circumstances made decision-making much more difficult.
A Robert Frost poem provides what may be the best single word of advice ever offered, “Prepare!”
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
