Staying in Charge , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company - Christopher Lukas , Karen Orloff Kaplan

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149 pages

English

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Practical, emotional, and spiritual guidance

The time may come when you or a loved one has to face a life-threatening illness; when you realize that you or your loved one may be dying. It's never easy to think about the last years of life, but being prepared can help you have your hopes and wishes realized. By taking the time now to plan for the future, you can maintain control of your life even at the very end.

Staying in Charge is a supportive guide to opening up the lines of communication and making life more fulfilling from the first day of diagnosis of a serious illness. This reassuring handbook helps you to focus on important matters such as:
* Handling a living will or a do-not-resuscitate order
* Deciding upon medical power of attorney
* Gathering support from friends and family
* And, most significantly, learning to live in the midst of dying

Based on the wisdom of many experts and caregivers in the field, Staying in Charge offers everything you need to know to make the last years of life more fruitful, less isolating, and more comfortable and peaceful-whenever and wherever the journey occurs.

"Few of us think of our own death with an open heart or a clear mind. Kaplan and Lukas courageously and compassionately demystify this unknown part of life with practical and spiritual guidance. With Staying in Charge, the secret is out: You can plan for death and, in so doing, learn how to live more fully."
-Beth Witrogen McLeod, author of Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss, and Renewal

"Staying in Charge: Practical Plans for the End of Your Life means what it says. When it comes time to manage a serious illness, we all want to be in control. There isn't a person alive who shouldn't read and absorb the counsel of this valorous-and unexpectedly cheering-work."
-Stefan Kanfer, former editor, Time magazine author of Ball of Fire and A Summer World
Introduction.

1. Why We Wrote This Book.

2. Obstacles to Good Care.

3. Thinking and Talking about Mortality.

4. Palliative Care.

5. The Facts about Hospice.

6. The ABCs of Advance Directives.

7. Choosing an Agent.

8. Being an Agent.

9. Matters of Mind and Spirit.

10. Caregivers.

11. Children and Serious Illness.

12. Nursing Homes.

13. When Crises Come.

14. DNRs and Assisted Dying.

15. Finances.

16. Give Grief a Chance.

17. Living with Dying.

Santé et bien-être

Santé mentale & traumatisme

Vie de famille

Soutien psychologique et conseils familiaux

Santé mentale

Bereavement

Christopher Lucas

Self-help

Grief

Death

Fracture familiale

Informations

Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	21 avril 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780470308011
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

STAYING IN CHARGE
STAYING IN CHARGE
Practical Plans for the End of Your Life
K AREN O RLOFF K APLAN , M.P.H., S C .D AND C HRISTOPHER L UKAS
Copyright 2004 by Karen Kaplan and Christopher Lukas. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
The authors gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to quote from:
That You May Live Long: Caring for Our Aging Parents, Caring for Ourselves, edited by Richard F. Address and Hara E. Person. Used by permission of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Press.
Covering the Issues of Death and Dying: A Journalist s Resource Guide, published, with support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, Washington, D.C., 1998.
Peaceful Dying by Daniel R. Tobin. Copyright 1999 by Daniel R. Tobin. Reprinted by permission of Perseus Books Publishers, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.
Being a Health Care Agent and Choosing a Health Care Agent by the New York Citizen s Committee on Health Care Decisions.
Crafting a Vessel for My Father told by Peggy King-Jorde, I Know How I Want to Die told by Elena Lister, from Giving a Voice to Sorrow by Steve Zeitlin and Ilana Harlow, copyright 2001 by Steve Zeitlin and Ilana Harlow. Used by permission of Perigee Books, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
Giorgianni S., Grana J., et al. A Profile of Caregiving in America. The Pfizer Journal. New York, NY: Pfizer Inc., 1997. Available at: www.thepfizerjournal.com
Design and production by Navta Associates, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600 or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com .
ISBN 0-471-27424-0
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For our families

How does one live with illness that will likely end life, but not yet, and not at any knowable time? What happens when we realize that death may not be so far away as we thought it was? How do we ask and answer the most important question- How do I want to live now? The answer will be different for everyone but most people, once they ve been posed the question, start thinking in a fresh way and start living with a new purpose. It s a nice lesson for all of us that one healthy response to facing a life-threatening illness is to live intensely and to live fully.
-Linda Emanuel, M.D.
The most important thing from an emotional point of view is not to be afraid to confront what this all means. We don t make wills because we re afraid of dying; and we don t make living wills because we don t want to discuss it, and our kids don t want us to talk to them about those things. But it s paramount. We have to have the courage to say, I ve got to think about this!
-Anita, health care proxy for her mother
I think that what families, what patients, what all of us can do as individuals who will be facing the end of life some day is to take a step back. Think of death as a normal process of living, and think how we would like that journey toward death to be. I have seen people do it and it is amazing. They ve done it under the worst circumstances and the most horrendous diseases. And they are able to do it because they ve made a commitment to talking with their families, to talking with their providers and saying what it is they want and how they want it to be.
-Anna Moretti, R.N., A.N.P., J.D.
C ONTENTS
Introduction
1 Why We Wrote This Book
2 Obstacles to Good Care
3 Thinking and Talking about Mortality
4 Palliative Care
5 The Facts about Hospice
6 The ABCs of Advance Directives
7 Choosing an Agent
8 Being an Agent
9 Matters of Mind and Spirit
10 Caregivers
11 Children and Serious Illness
12 Nursing Homes
13 When Crises Come
14 DNRs and Assisted Dying
15 Finances
16 Give Grief a Chance
17 Living with Dying
Suggested Reading
Resources
Acknowledgments
Index
I NTRODUCTION
There may come a time when you are diagnosed with a serious illness. You realize that you are, after all, mortal. You realize that decisions have to be made about how to cure that illness, or how to face the likelihood that that illness will be with you for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.
And there may come a time when your illness is so severe that you know it is your final illness.
There may come a time when you can no longer make all health decisions for yourself.
There may come a time when cure fades as an option and quality of life becomes paramount.
There may come a time when you or others have to decide whether you go to a hospital, a hospice, or a nursing home.
And at any one of these times, you may realize you don t have all the information you need to make the next decision or cope with a crisis.
This book is designed to help you start thinking about these moments in the last years of your journey and to start talking about the things that are important to you. It s time to care-about your loved ones and about yourself.
It s time to think about what the words quality of life mean to you.
It s time to think about how to live with life-threatening illnesses, not just how to die with them.
At one time we considered calling this book Dying 101: Getting It Right the First Time, because in a way finding out about serious illness and how to make mortality less burdensome is as much a course of study as any other transition in life. And while, of course, death never can be conquered, the fears about it and the transition to it can be tempered by understanding.
But this book is about a lot more than dying-far more. It s about how to think about the future, how to take steps to avoid some of the things you fear most about being seriously ill. It s about learning how to gather forces around you so that you re supported by your loved ones. And it s about how to support others.
Learning about chronic illnesses and about what finally happens to all of us-the dying process-should not be a strange concept. After all, you take the time and opportunity to learn about all sorts of things: about pregnancy and birth, raising infants and adolescents; about how the planets work, who the founding fathers were, why ain t isn t grammatical. You go to high school, perhaps to college. You learn law and medicine and engineering, how to tie your shoes, dial the phone, use a computer. The most intricate details of your lives-from sex to menopause, from keeping a checkbook to filling out a tax form- all have to be learned.
Frankly, dying is too important a part of the life cycle to let it happen haphazardly, without planning, without thinking about it, without learning about it. Besides, dying, as we see it, is about a long, long period of time. It s about your life from the moment you have a diagnosis of any potentially life-threatening illness, no matter what your age. It s about months and months, and years and years for most of us. Dying is a matter of emotional and spiritual approach, not simply a physical end to life.
So before you close this book and put it away (in fear or denial), let us tell you that this book isn t about the last breaths you will take. It s about learning to live with dying, about taking the time to think about how long you have to live, and-because of modern medicine-how much time may be spent dying. It s about thinking about the unmentionable so that you will not have to be afraid during your last twenty or thirty years of living. It s about preventing the things you most fear about dying:
Being alone
Losing control
Being in pain
Being without spiritual peace
This book will tell you why you can
Be certain you have company when you are ill or dying
Be almost entirely pain-free
Avoid some anxiety and panic if you are diagnosed with a serious illness
Finally, it will tell you how to protect yourself and your loved ones from the conspiracy of silence that surrounds dying and death.
But there s more: we will also look at the spiritual and emotional reserves that you possess to deal with the approaching end of life. We will tell you about the corps of trained people waitin