I had an experience with my mother when she was dying of cancer at the end of last year. She had the medical advanced directive in her trust......it was in place, but it was necessary for 2 Dr 's to write that she no longer had the cognative ability to make decisions for herself.

The catch was that when she was back in the hospital when she started getting worse, I could see there was a problem with her ability to think & reason.....like a question in the sunday paper she couldn't figure out the simplest answer to it......then it took her 15 minutes to figure out how she wanted the $100 to be broken up & when I tried to help she told me I was confusing her (& she had been a bank teller for years). After noticing this, I asked her Dr about it....thought she might have had a stroke or even the cancer spreading to her brain. He swore that is was only that she was getting older & that people with a chronic illness have that problem. I tried my hardest to be at the hospital when the social worker & her Dr were talking to her.....but was always left out because "she was capable of making her decisions" & she wanted to go home so bad she didn't want me to hear what they had to say. The problem was that I was the one that had to make the arrangments only I had no knowledge to make the correct arrangements. When she was discharged, I didn't even know what kind of care she needed at home which was part of the reason that the RN ended up in the home care picture. The RN knew exactly what was needed & could take care of everything & make it all go easy. I found out at the end from her Dr that both he & the social worker had told her she needed to be in a nursing home in the first place.

It wasn't until 3 weeks before she died that I was able to get the Dr's to admit that her cognative abilities were such that she could no longer make intelligent decisions.....where it should have happened a month before that. Maybe in the mental aspect of advance directives it is easier to get that determination, but in the medical area......she was able to hide her condition from those that didn't know her.

I agree that the advance directives are important....don't get me wrong......I do not disagree at all with them.....& am planning on having them put into place soon......but I hope that maybe from my experience any of you in a similar position that I was in may be able to push a little harder than I did & not get trapped into the situation I did.

I was in kinda a catch 22.....I was the trustee & I was the one questioning her capability which would take away any of her decision making on everything I would be in charge of(which I wouldn't have done completely. Finally at the end after the RN had OD'ed my Mother & she was back in the hospital, I told her that even if she wanted to go home again, I wouldn't make those arrangements again & that she didn't have any choice other than the nursing home that time.....but the hell I went through because of her decisions being able to be forced on me by default is the trauma I am still dealing with 10 months after her death.

It is a difficult position to be in because medical Dr's tend not to want to take away the decision making process from their medical patients.....it may be much more simple in the mental health situation since it is mental issues that are being delt with anyway.

I am planning to have a lawyer put together all my trust papers & advance directives along with making all the arrangements for my future so my daughter will have nothing to worry about when the time comes.

I also hope that maybe with the situation that I was in being made aware, that hopefully it may help anyone that might end up in a similar situation as mine be able to stop it from ending up like mine did.

I am glad you put this post out for the information you have provided is definitely a necessary thing for us to have in place for our lives......I would hope that situations like mine are not that common....but thought I would put it out there for realizing that things don't always go well even when things are specified.

Thank you,
Debbie