Nearly twenty years ago, the front desk bring the phone to my nurse and me in a panic. Holding it out at arm's length.
An elderly woman is on the phone. Her voice quavers. "My husband is asleep in his chair. I can't wake him up. He is cold." pause. "What do I do?"
"We will send an ambulance. Right now." We keep her on the phone while we call 911. All activity ceases at the front desk and with my patients while we wait. Some of us cry.
He is quite dead. He is the one who did want to be resuscitated so he could keep taking care of his wife: here.
He can not be resuscitated.
The family comes, scoops up his wife, and for all I know she may still be alive, with "end stage COPD".
This is a good time to update wills as well as living wills and POLST forms. My father had a will but it was from 1979. He dies in 2013. The Executor gets sued. I updated my will last year after a decade. My children are both nearly 21, they are responsible, I feel so lucky. One is executor and the other is the medical power of attorney. Also, my sister was my medical power of attorney: I know from experience that physicians find it difficult to ask the dead for guidance.
And all of the people named in my father's will except me were already dead when he died.