"Advanced Directives"

We’ve all read about the horrors faced by well-meaning people when a family member or loved one—albeit mother, father, wife, husband, child—becomes severely mentally incapacitated by an accident, stroke, or other brain-killing ailment.

So often these ill people have left no written instructions regarding how they should be looked after should such a calamity occur. Our doctors and nurses are obligated under the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” and our legal system is charged with protecting the well being of our citizens.

In the best of circumstances, the person will recover his health and continue to live a rewarding and productive life. The horror occurs when the person cannot recover and slips into a vegetative state and neither the family, the medical profession, nor the legal system is able to decide a course of action because the ill person has left no advance directive.

A true story by William H. Colby called, Long Goodbye, the Deaths of Nancy Cruzan is a legal, medical, and personal thriller about a situation that confronts the parents of a young woman who is in a persistent vegetative state after being thrown from her car in an accident that occurred in 1987. Because of the futility of their daughter’s condition, the parents made the heart-wrenching decision to remove her feeding tube. Their proposed course of action ignites a firestorm of publicity and protests from well-intentional right-to-lifers.

The state intervened and denied the family's wishes. Thus began an extended legal battle over who had the right to authorize the end of the medical treatment that kept Nancy’s body alive.

Drawing on the taped recollections of Cruzan's father and his own records, Colby, the attorney who represented the family throughout the legal battles, chronicles the human drama of a family forced to live its most intimate moments in the courts and the media.

He tracks the case from its beginning in probate court in a small town in Missouri to the U.S. Supreme Court. After three years of litigation and seven years spent in a vegetative state, Nancy Cruzan was finally permitted to die.

Long Goodbye takes the reader on an emotional journey of those who were trying to do the right thing, in accordance with the unverifiable wishes of one who could not speak for herself. It’s a story about an issue that many people confront every day in our hospitals and nursing homes. At the crux of the matter is the right to life, the right to die, and exactly who has the final authority over the life of a loved one who can no longer speak for himself.

November is “National Hospice Month”. The Columbus Public Library and the Columbus Community Hospital are sponsoring two sessions at the Library where people can obtain notarized advanced directive forms. The first session will be on Tuesday, November 15th from 1 to 3 PM and the second session will be on Thursday, November 17th from 3 PM to 7 PM. Both sessions will be held in the Library’s auditorium on the second floor. This service is being provided free of charge by the Columbus Community Hospital.

If you are unable to attend either of these sessions, you can go to Internet and log on at: http://www.hhs.state.ne.us/ags/advdir.htm to print a copy of Nebraska-sanctioned “living will” form as well as a copy of the “Power of Attorney For Health Care” form. These forms should be signed in front of a notary public who will then stamp them to certify that they were signed by the said person.

Recent donations to the Library Foundation include those in memory of Irene Wurdeman from Mr. and Mrs. Don Washburn, Lucille and Burns Ellison, and Mary Alyce Krohnke. The Library Foundation also received a donation from Runza Restaurants for its “Great Books for Great Kids” program