Obviously we’d encourage people to plan ahead, but also, most people don’t die suddenly—slow declines are vastly more common. Personally, when I think about people I’ve known, almost all of them knew they were reaching the end well in advance.
Slow declines aren’t always synonymous with losing hope for a substantial recovery (or recovering enough so that death doesn’t seem to be imminent). In the case of my late wife, there was a clear path to recovery: become healthy enough to have kidney transplant surgery (obesity makes the surgery itself much more dangerous, and there were other issues too), which would likely have solved a lot of her most severe problems. (I immediately volunteered to be a living donor; we had the same blood type, but I never found out if I was otherwise qualified to be a kidney donor.)
Assuming you don’t do this until you are terminally ill, what is the chance of having enough time to plan this, rather than needing emergency service?
Obviously we’d encourage people to plan ahead, but also, most people don’t die suddenly—slow declines are vastly more common. Personally, when I think about people I’ve known, almost all of them knew they were reaching the end well in advance.
Slow declines aren’t always synonymous with losing hope for a substantial recovery (or recovering enough so that death doesn’t seem to be imminent). In the case of my late wife, there was a clear path to recovery: become healthy enough to have kidney transplant surgery (obesity makes the surgery itself much more dangerous, and there were other issues too), which would likely have solved a lot of her most severe problems. (I immediately volunteered to be a living donor; we had the same blood type, but I never found out if I was otherwise qualified to be a kidney donor.)