End of Life Thoughts
End of life care
This topic is very interesting to me because my grandparents are getting older. My grandma just went through a difficult chemo and radiation cancer treatment. A year later she is doing much better but there were some tough months where the family was trying determine where she was going to live and who was going to help her. She wanted to just go home and not have any help. They did find a balance but it has created a lot of talk within our family about end of life care. My mom, after trying very hard to get her mother to move closer to one of her children and only getting extreme resistance, has told me sisters and I, when she gets older she will move closer to one of us. Sounds great right now but circumstances might be different if she is really sick and needing a lot of medical care and even more challenging if insurance didn’t cover most of it. What if the natural order of end of life doesn’t follow suit. Then what? Those are very hard discussions to have with your family.
There is a very good podcast with Freakonomics that I recently listened to called “Are you ready for a glorious sunset?” It discusses the reality of end of life care and the cost of living your last few months. One of the most interesting guest on the show was a doctor and he said he would not want all the tests and days in the hospital. He believed a financial incentive for patients who didn’t forgo end of life treatment was a good idea for the patient and the family. Go on one last trip, buy a house for their family or buy that last dream sports cars. On paper that seems very desirable but there are some tricky aspects. I think it also comes down to the family making life saving measures of someone they cherish without fully knowing the costs. In moments of dying loved ones, cost isn’t the issue but maybe it needs to be information that is available to the decision makers.
I hope that I can have more discussions with my parents before it becomes a tricky decision making process.
