Quote:
Originally Posted by justjim
The "spirit" of a living will as I understand it is to not keep a person alive who is in a "vegetable state". Reviving someone who has had an immediate heart attack is something entirely different.
That is why I have a living will (not to be kept alive as a vegetable for weeks) but being revived following a heart attack and hopefully have recovery I view as something different.
A living will keeps you off artifical life support systems for weeks and weeks. A Defibrillator is not an artificial life support machine.
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But you are only imagining your own situation when there may be any number of situations that we can't imagine. Being in a vegetable state is not the only situation. For example, someone with incurable cancer may have a stroke or heart attack and not want to be brought back. More and more people have cancer that is treated as a chronic condition. They may have been fighting it for ten years, on and off. So, for that reason, they might not want to be brought back.
When my aunt was quite elderly (late eighties) she would go for walks by herself and you would never know that she had anything wrong with her. But she had kidney failure and needed kidney dialysis a couple times per week. If you don't know about kidney dialysis, it's a terrible way to live. Some elderly people stop the treatment knowing they will die without it. If she was out walking and had a heart attack, I'm sure she wouldn't have wanted to be saved.