Vial of Life

I ran across this item at Bartell Drugs. They were selling them at the counter for a $1 donation.

The product is called Vial of Life. It's basically a large prescription pill bottle, and it comes with a magnet and some paperwork. You put the magnet on your fridge, fill out the paperwork in the bottle, and place the bottle in your fridge.

The magnet lets any emergency medical workers who might be called to your residence know that you have a Vial of Life in your fridge.

The paperwork includes information on medications, whether you have an advance directive, contact information for family members, any do not resuscitate orders you may have, even medical records if you want.

There is also an online version that involves affixing paperwork to the front of your refrigerator in a plastic bag.

The program is aimed at seniors, but it could be useful for anyone who has health problems. I love the idea of encouraging people to store their pertinent medical information in an easily accessible spot, especially in a way that emergency workers can find if they have to treat you while you are unconscious.

Cybertime—Repost

Reposting my post on Cybertime from earlier in the year that Dr. Sinclair called a "must read," in his Palliative Grand Rounds so that anyone looking for it doesn't have to search through the archives ...

My mom just opened up a Gmail account that she rarely uses. Actually, rarely is an understatement. She set it up, but really hasn't opened it up since then. So, it has sat idle for a couple of years. But fed up with hotmail spam, she finally decided to switch to the account.

When she logged in, she found 177 emails from my grandfather, her father, who died 14 months ago.

Email provides us with some odd timing situations ... and they can be especially odd when the sender has passed on. Susan Barnes writes about the nature of time as it relates to email: "Email messages are sent and received in asynchronous time." Barnes continues, "Cybertime blurs the distinctions between past, present, and future because when reading email we have the sense of simultaneously conversing with the author in cyberspace."

The author sends the email in the present, and it sits in our inbox for a given amount of time ... could be seconds, could be years. However, whenever it is that we get around to reading it, we perceive that moment to be the present for the email.

In cases where the author has since passed on in real-time, the reader is left in a strange, emotional limbo in which the author still exists in cybertime.

Most of my grandfather's emails were silly forwards about safety at the gas pump, not forgetting 9-11, etc., so it probably wasn't as jarring as receiving 177 new, personally crafted emails ... but still, it had to be a disquieting experience for my mother.

Palliative Care Grand Rounds, Vol 1, Issue 1

The inaugural issue of the Palliative Care Grand Rounds blog is up at Pallimed: A Hospice & Palliative Medicine Blog. 

Set to be published on the first Wednesday of every month, these posts will rotate through different palliative-care-focused blogs and will highlight the best content on hospice care, palliative care, death, dying, and end-of-life issues that is currently out in the blogosphere. 

This month's entry is written by the always thoughtful Dr. Christian Sinclair, and it is a must read!

And you thought it was bad when it rang in the middle of the night

A local Seattle television station, King 5, has this news report about the growing trend of being buried with a cellphone.

According to the story, it is the second most popular request, after the request to be buried with a pet's ashes (which is currently illegal in this state.)

My first thought was that the trend was a throwback to the days when people were buried with a string that connected to a bell above ground that they could ring in case they had accidentally been buried alive. If you have your cell phone, theoretically, you could call someone if you somehow got buried by mistake.

But it does go further for some people.

The funeral director interviewed for this piece says the trend makes sense to him. The reporter finishes the thought, saying "it keeps the lines of communication open." Can I just say, no it doesn't. I'm pretty sure making a phone call to a cellphone buried six feet underground, in the possession of a dead person, is closed communication. No conscious person is receiving that message.

I can't embed the video, but here's a link.

http://www.king5.com/video/featured-index.html?nvid=328650&shu=1

In the great extreme, a woman in Manhattan has kept her husband's cellphone contract current two years after his death, and has carved his phone number on his headstone so other people can call him. Does she realize the digital technology will not reanimate his body and will not allow passers by the talk to his dead, no-longer conscious form? In that case, it seems an extreme version of not being able to let go.



On a side note, the funeral director interviewed for the King 5 piece says the thing he is most often asked to put in caskets is a can of beer: "One for the road." Really?

"That's what a hospital is for."

"Nobody should have to go to work thinking, 'Oh this is the place that I might die today.' That's what a hospital is for."

-Michael Scott on last night's special episode of The Office.

The following chaos ensues after Stanley has a heart attack:



You can watch the full episode online, here.

Death with Dignity Deadline Approaches in Washington

According to The Seattle Times, medical organizations throughout Washington state are struggling with whether to participate in Washington's new Death with Dignity Act.

And whether they decide to participate, they are frantically working to prepare for the March 5 deadline to be ready for implementation. Caregivers must be able to handle questions on the law, be set to refer patients, give out prescriptions if they and their organization are choosing to do so, know their policy on mental-health evaluations, etc.

Oregon, the only other state to legalize death with dignity, ended up with approximately three years to implement their law due to all of the legal challenges brought against it, as this New England Journal of Medicine article pointed out. Since their state's law was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, we're unlikely to end up in a similar situation.

Let's hope for some patience and cool heads during this transition. It's a tight, tight deadline for Washington state. Only four months to put into place a very complicated and very controversial law.

A Super Bowl Story

From The Today Show:

The story of Super Bowl Star, Arizona Cardinals' Larry Fitzgerald, is a story of not saying I'm sorry until it was too late.

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