Plan for Your End of Life Care
My mom, her primary care doctor and I sat around the table and kind of talked about what kind of care my mother wanted at the end of her life. I didn't know how to talk with her about this or how to help her make these decisions. On the form, there was a question about whether she should be sent to the hospital or be treated for pneumonia and have a feeding tube. If we hadn't had this conversation beforehand, I don't know how I would have held up
under making those decisions.
—Emily, 60, social worker
Here are articles from our Prepared Patient feature series about planning for the end of your life. These articles are based on interviews with experts and people around the country about some of their experiences making legal preparations for care when they become unable to communicate their wishes, and sharing their plans for their end of life care with family and health care providers.

In the right column, Prepared Patient 411 offers online, phone and community resources to assist you. And in Related Research, we share the most current scientific research in brief news stories.

We invite you to share your own experiences planning for the end of your life or that of a loved one. You can post a reply to any of our featured articles, blogs and news stories.



Prepared Patient ® Featured Articles
Hospice Care: What Is It, Anyway?
Three a.m. can be a lonely time for caregivers.

But when Renata Rafferty's husband Jerome struggled to breathe late one night, she knew she wasn't completely alone. Though it was the middle of the night when Renata called, the on-call nurse at their hospice arranged an emergency delivery of oxygen from a medical supplier. She sent over a nurse to check on Jerome, who had Lewy Body dementia - a progressive neurological disease — and an incurable, antibiotic-resistant intestinal infection. At the request of the nurse, a hospital chaplain arrived to provide emotional aid to Renata, a consultant and author from Evansville, Ind.

Now, 15 months after Jerome's death, Renata still speaks to people about her experience with hospice care.

"People think of a hospice as the place you go to die. That's why people fight going into hospice, and that's why loved ones fight. But it's not the place you go to die, it's the place you go to celebrate and finish your life, in an environment where that is the sole and only focus," Rafferty said.
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Advance Directives: Caring for You & Your Family
Heather Rubesch first remembers talking with her mom, Linda, about end-of-life care as a teenager. "When I was 14, I had an aunt who passed because she did not receive a kidney transplant. As a family, we had that conversation-if something happened to one of us, organ donation was what we wanted to do," said Rubesch, 37, a business and marketing writer from Kansas City, Mo.

Decades later, when Heather got the call from the hospital, informing her of her mother's terminal condition, she was shocked to discover she was expected to make immediate decisions about her mother's end-of-life care.

Almost too late, Heather learned that her mother had created an advance directive and had named her daughter as her health care decision maker — but she had never informed anyone in the family.
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