Suppose one of your wishes is to refuse attempts at Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation. Emergency medical personnel in most states are trained to honor two instruments. One is a piece of paper called the official pre-hospital DNR, out-of-hospital order DNR, or Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment, which both you and your physician must sign. Problem: this piece of paper may be hard to locate quickly in emergencies. The other instrument is a medallion or bracelet that you wear all the time. Problem: bracelets are too small to provide much information beyond the “DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate). While larger medallions can be engraved with a few additional orders, they cannot play videos to help convince all to HONOR your wishes. In contrast, the MyLastWishes.org Program offers solutions in five areas in addition to the DNR order [1], which may need to be supplemented by other physician’s orders in order to make sure you can attain your goal of a timely, peaceful transition. For example, One important physician order is: “Do NOT start an I.V.” (intravenous hydration). The reason is that extra fluid can prolong the process of dying and increase the risk of more pain and suffering. Yet paramedics have been trained to start an I.V. almost “automatically” and this could inadvertently sabotage your goal to attain a timely, peaceful transition. Thus, paramedics must be alerted NOT to start an I.V. The other five important areas are:

[2] Suppose the time is before you would want Natural Dying and that you have a chronic life-threatening illness. Your chance of survival is better if emergency medical personnel and physicians can quickly learn your diagnoses and medications. Such information would permit clinicians to focus, for example, on the most likely cause of sudden loss of consciousness.

[3] Patients in the middle stages of Alzheimerrsquo;s disease risk wandering and getting lost, which could cause harm and even be life-threatening. People who find the lost patient must quickly learn the patient’s identity, the family members’ address and contact information, and the physician’s contact information. MyLastWishes.org’s current technology can provide a map and directions from where the patient is found, to their home.

[4] Suppose the time comes that you do want Natural Dying. Your previously recorded video lets you express WHAT you want and explain your reasons WHY. Your physician’s video verifies you gave your informed consent for Natural Dying (to die by medical dehydration). These one or two videos can help convince others to HONOR your wishes.

[5] For your continuing care after an emergency, your future physicians can retrieve all your Advance Directive forms and your signed informed consent forms; such as to receive Palliative Sedation (if no other way can relieve unbearable pain and suffering), and not to receive Manual Assistance with Oral Feeding and Drinking.

[6] Others may need access to your financial papers and your signed financial power of attorney. The latter may be the kind of document that you decide to label as “Private,” when you submit it for storing, to Caring Advocates. You may also want to include in your “private” papers, your “Ethical Will,” where you describe the VALUES that were important for you to live by, and which you would like to recommend to others who follow you.


How MyLastWishes.org works: You can enter your important information yourself online, or you can call a Caring Advocates staff person who can take your information over the phone and enter it for you. Call 800 64 PEACE (647 3223). You can also send Caring Advocates all the forms you want stored for rapid, future retrieval. You can record your videos yourself, or you can have an interview with one of Caring Advocates' Planning Professionals over the Internet. All you need is a webcam. Caring Advocates can try to locate a physician in your state, to verify that you gave your informed consent.

In the mail, you will receive two-dimensional barcodes in several sizes that you can paste on your Living Will, wallet card, driver’s license, and that clinicians can place on your medical chart, DNR Order or POLST, and similar forms. You can put the larger barcodes on the door of your refrigerator, your bedpost, your computer monitor, and your TV.

Try It for Yourself

What happens in an emergency if you set up the MyLastWishes.org Program? Almost all “smart phones” can read these bar codes with a free downloaded ''APP'' (application). If you have a smart phone and have or are willing to download this APP, you can try it out, right here. You can also view a demonstration on the video, “MyLastWishes.org.”

View example of a menu emergency medical personnel, emergency department physicians, and others will see:
Note that for each item, they can immediately view the information on-screen, request an Internet download of a PDF or get a FAX —or both.  CLICK HERE