One very interesting piece of information that we picked up a couple of years after Mom died shed some light on this whole DNR issue. It was so bizaare how we found this out. It was in Cuba of all places, and one of the other tourists had begun chatting with me beside the pool. She kept asking me questions about my Mom, which I found both rare and comforting. I told her the whole story, about how she was so mistreated and neglected in the hospital.

Turns out that this woman was the public relations person for the geriatric unit at the hospital where my Mother had been so mistreated!!! Had I known, I would never have spoken, because we try to always protect other tourists' privacy and right to be on vacation, so we never talk shop with other tourists. But she insisted, and asked the questions. Afterward, she looked me in the eye and promised me that she was going to use this information to make the entire system better for terminally ill patients.

[which I believe she did...years later, there was a lengthy series in our local paper about how this hospital had done exactly that...and she was the primary instigator of those changes, and in the paper cited 'a story' which, while not supplying any names, was my Mom's story.]

Anyway, this woman also told me that, although it was not right, it was still common amongst the nurses and other medical staff to develop an "attitude of dismissal" towards patients with that DNR on their charts. They tended to focus more on the patients who did not have that DNR on their charts. Which would explain why my Mom (who had DNR on her charts at her request, not ours) would have experienced such coldness and utter unspeakable negligence.

So after hearing that, I'm not sure I could ever advocate any of my loved ones to choose to have that DNR option written on their charts. Perhaps make it understood by loved ones that that is their wish, but I think it's still risky to have it on the charts while a patient in the hospital.

Maybe others have had similar - or different experiences with that. That was over 10 years ago. Maybe that attitude has changed since then.