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Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
A 'living will' would or should have prevented that.....she would have not have been intubated and would have been allowed to succumb.
I don't know if you have the equivalent of living wills in Italy.
Sometimes the doctors will speak with relatives of seriously ill patients who are not expected to survive and will mark the notes DNR(do not resuscitate) but my own experience of this, is that the consultants that I worked with were very reluctant to mark this in the case notes...regardless of how hopeless the case was....and in the absence of such a record, it meant that if the patient arrested we had to attempt resuscitation. This is not good when you have a patient in the terminal stages of cancer.......all you are doing is prolonging their suffering and pain.
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This was 6 yrs ago Margaret, so living wills were not common. Also the doctors convinced my sister-in-law to continue the treatment, giving the impression that there could be some hope when effectively there was not.
By contrast we looked after my Father-in-law through lung cancer at home in 2001 and he had a much better "end", with good pain control and assistence once we had managed to get it in place..i think most patients would rather not be in hospital when they know they are terminal.