Does anybody know about Do Not Resuscitate notices?

[BigBoobiedBertha]

Not sure if this is the place for this question but I couldn't think of anywhere else.

My father has just come out of hospital after 2 months. He went in with a bladder infection in the middle of August which turned to pneumonia and then, just as he was getting better but still very wobbly on his legs, he fell and broke his hip bone and ended up having a hip replacement. He also has Alzeheimers which has considerably worsened whilst he was away.

Anyway, he is home now and my mother has been given all sorts of bits of paper. This morning she showed me a container she is supposed to keepfor paramedics to find and in it, amongst other things, was a notice not to resuscitate.

Now, my father is 82, he is very frail and has been very ill. At one point it looked like he would die. He is incapable of making the Do Not resuscitate decsion himself although I suspect if he were lucid for a while, based on what he has said in the past, he would agree with it. My mother however is shocked that this could be put in place without reference to her or my father. I said that if she didn't want it in place then she should take it out of the emergency container thing (sorry don't know the right terminology) but of course, that is only one copy of several so once he got to hospital they would know about it there and what she wanted would be ignored, presumably.

I suppose my question is to ask whether they (the powers that be, doctors or whoever made the decsion) can put something in place without consulting the patient or their family and what if anything, my mother can do about it as his next of kin. She may decide that it is for the best but we still think she should have been consulted.

Thanks.

I agree with bec, often being resuscitated just means dying later in ITU, a horrible, noisey, scary, alien place to die. Or worse, living with no quality of life. Most never sit up and say "thank you very much doctor". Many never speak again even if they "live". The telly programs may be accurate enough about the actual process, but not so much about the usual outcomes

it's horrible

There is much more suffering in the last minuites if resuscitated than if DNR,

"Stranglely I only remember the ones in ER where they don't get better and all the docs are left there looking dejected with a scene of carnage around them"

that's not the worst case scenario though, dying is preferable over it technically working but no quality of life left after it. this is where it's unrealistic, on telly it either works or it doesn't, a lot of the time it "works" but it doesn't revive you to how you were before

Ultimately, it all boils down to them not taking the time to tell us about what they had decided and why. They should have told my mother why the DNR was preferable to attempting to resuscitate. My mother is even more clueless than me about this sort of thing. Finding a form in your emergency information pack explained very little. With all the worries that there are at the moment about the standard of care of Alzeheimer's patients and the elderly in general, it could look like they don't care enough to even try to help, especially if you are one of the elderly yourself and you are having to navigate yourself around the care and health services for the first time in your life, like my parents. All it would have taken is one conversation to remove some of the worries but they didn't bother. I have to admit, I was quite relieved when I saw the DNR. My mother handed it to me like it was something scary and I would find it upsetting but I have thought for a long time that if it came to it, it wouldn't be worth resuscitating and I was quite glad that nobody's pain was being dragged out, either for my father or my mother. The reservation I had was whether they would just withdraw all treatment before any heart failure and since you have reassured that it won't be like that, I really am comfortable with the whole idea. I didn't say that to my mother because she seemed shocked at the time but she has come to terms with it now we have talked about it again.

My father has been waiting to die for a while now. He repeatedly said it before he had the Alzeheimer's dx when his eye sight was failing but even more so recently. Probably it was some sort of depression talking so I have to be cautious in accepting that at face value but if things got so bad it was a question of whether you bother with CPR or not I wouldn't want to go through it knowing he was probably ready to go anyway.

Somebody talked earlier about getting a care package but that is been in place for a while. My mother gets 12 hours a week respite plus she has had carers to get my father up since June and now, from this week, they will come in 4 times a day for a few weeks when they will assess his needs again. That is fine at the moment but his care up until now is a whole other thread's worth of misinformation and lack of communication but I won't bore you with it now!