Is your living will adequate?

Many people ( in fact 20% of adults) have living wills. However, with the advances in medical technology are the typically vague living wills enough?

The NY Times article, “Medical Due Diligence: A Living Will Should Spell Out the Specifics”, is great at explaining how living wills that are not specific enough can lead to misinterpretation. One case described is the following:

…A very active 64-year-old woman who nearly died because a nurse read her living will as a D.N.R. statement. The woman had slipped on ice and broken a leg, which was reset surgically. On the second postoperative day she began bleeding in her abdomen, and excreted and vomited blood. But the nurse saw her living will and told the physician on call that she was D.N.R. and thus did not warrant admission to the intensive care unit. Fortunately, another physician overrode the nurse’s interpretation and resuscitated the woman, who successfully underwent emergency surgery to stop the bleeding.

After the Terry Schiavo case, many people got living wills; however, a living will can sometimes do more harm than good--- if not written correctly. Therefore, the article gives suggestions on how to improve your living will so as to make it more specific—ie. an advanced directive including a “code status” that “tells medical personnel exactly how someone wants to be treated in a life-threatening medical emergency.”

A living will is our medical wishes put into legal form so that others don’t have to be burdened with trying to guess what we would have wanted. You’d be surprised if you speak to your loved ones what their wishes would be--- or that they don’t know what your wishes are.