Living Will: Planning for End-of-Life Issues

You can never be certain on what will happen to you so it is important to plan ahead. Making some preparations is forward thinking. Despite the sensitiveness of issues like injury - illness and death - it is always best to prepare so that you can make sure that you will receive the proper treatment. Preparing early would also spare your family from antagonizing on every decision that needs to be done. It also clears up some confusion between family members and even with your doctors on the best course of action regarding your medical treatments. And the perfect way to do all this is to have a living will - planning for end-of-life issues should always be part of our goals.

When you plan ahead - you need to do some considerable thinking. It is important to know how you want your family and doctors will treat you when such a situation comes up. You might want to read more about all kinds of options for life-sustaining treatments to come up with the best decision on your living will. The living will can be canceled any time whenever you see fit. This is only natural since recent advancement in medical care might change your mind regarding certain procedures. You might want to accept a procedure that you previously crossed out.

You need to be specific in your living will. Cite which treatments you don’t want and which ones you would prefer and so on. However - please understand that a living will cannot possibly cover all circumstances. There might be a situation where a living will is vague regarding a treatment or your instructions are subject to certain interpretations. With this in mind - part of a arranging advance directives for your medical care is assigning a healthcare proxy or a medical power of attorney {POA} assign to someone you trust. This person will take on the responsibility of ensuring that all your wishes in your living will is followed by your family and medical team.

Another important job of a health proxy is to decide on your behalf. Like what have been mentioned before - some aspects of your living will might be vague or there might be some new medical procedures which might have changed some of the elements in the will it is important to have someone to make sound decisions. A medical POA assigned to a person will give him the right to interpret your wishes in situations that are not clearly stated in your will.

A health agent proxy’s responsibilities and rights can be limited to a certain degree depending on what you want. You can also change the person to be your proxy anytime. It is just simply filling up a form and making it legal. Pick a person that you belief will make good decisions for you. Your selecting a proxy should never be influenced by any of your emotions.

Having a living will - planning for end-of-life issues is something that you seriously need to think about. Having a legal document and having someone to act as your health proxy would be to your advantage especially if your family is not too keen on some of the treatments or procedures that you don’t want to have.