Document can make decisions easier for family

Kalispell Regional Medical Center spokesman Jim Oliverson knows firsthand how important living wills can be.

He and his family didn't have the benefit of having a living will (a document someone drafts telling physicians and loved ones how to handle his or her life or death medical decisions) when it came time to decide his father's fate after a stroke.

In 1989, Oliverson's mother called to tell him the family had two options for treating his 82-year-old father.

The doctors could try to remove the clot in his brain. If they were successful, he would be either "dead from the neck down" or would have no past memory, Oliverson says.

"I knew he wouldn't want to be in (either) state," he says.

Or they could choose not to operate and let him pass away on his own.

Oliverson told his mother to go with the second option. His father died a week later.

"It was very difficult because we'd never had that conversation," he says.

He and his mother made the decision based on what the knew of his father's personality, not because his family had ever explicitly talked about what to do in that kind of situation, Oliverson says.

If his father had a living will or had designated a power of attorney for health care (someone who makes decisions on someone's behalf if that person is incapacitated), the decision would have been easier because he and his mother would have known precisely what his father wanted, he explains.

"That's something we struggle with here daily," he says of the hospital.

Many patients who arrive at the hospital don't have a living will or a nominated power of attorney, so loved ones have to make decisions on their behalf without the benefit of the patients' input, chaplain and nurse Eddie Nye says. And that can mean heartache and even family feuds.

"I think every high school graduate should get (living will and power of attorney) packet upon graduation," says Jennifer Schaffner, manager of social services at Kalispell Regional Medical Center. "It's that important."

Anyone 18 and older can draft living wills and power of attorney document. And even young, healthy people should make up those documents, Schaffner says.

Accidents and illness can strike people of any age at any time, so having living wills and power of attorney papers drawn up is a good idea for the young and old, Kalispell attorney Michael Keedy advises.

"You just never know what can happen," he says.