Adam Lambert at The National

My story is on my other blog here.

Can I Get a Do Over?

I thought my husband was a content soul who was satisfied with his life…until I overheard him telling a focus group moderator that he wasn’t.

I asked him about this later. He said he realized now that he had made some serious mistakes when he was younger – not going to college, not getting into a less physical line of work. As his body starts to prematurely wear out, he realizes he could have had an easier time of it and made more money if he had chosen a career that used his still sharp brain more, something like engineering or computer technology.

Now I feel bad about all the times I took shots at him for wasting his intellect. Don't most of us make crucial life-impacting decisions between the ages of 16 and 24, when we are most likely to be swayed by the stupidest of motives?

When my 19-year-old son got a small tattoo on his leg, I cried. This is a mistake, I told him. He didn’t believe me. When he dropped out of college a year later to travel around the United States, I told him this was a mistake. He couldn’t fathom staying in his boring hometown anymore. About 12 years later, he came home, though, and finished college. His legs and arms are covered in tattoos, and for his chosen career, he diplomatically keeps them hidden.

He gets frustrated that his career isn’t as far along as others his age, but I have to remind him he got a late start. While he was roaming free and unencumbered by physical possessions, the whole computer age happened. When he checked back into school, he had to learn the basic skills that kids are almost born knowing now. Things are moving so fast technologically, it's hard to keep up even if you had stayed current.

There’s nothing I can say now to undo decisions my son or husband made when they were in their twenties. When he was in the critical 16-24 years, my husband put a higher priority on getting unshackled from the control of teachers and parents than in continuing his education. Even now, a mental fog about being a rock musician has been the deciding factor on how he spends his weekends and evenings and has crowded out any ideas of picking up his education where he left off. His four or more nights a week devoted to practice or playing has taken away from our marriage, as well. I wonder if a decade or two from now, he’ll look back at that decision and think, gee, what did I miss, and for what?

For several years now, I’ve been saying this is a bad idea. How much more time and money can we afford to invest in playing covers in bar bands? But he still enjoys it. He hasn’t made the connection yet that his second chance to accomplish a career change is being defeated by the time demands of his hobby. By the time he does, it will be too late…again.

By why should anyone listen to me when I didn’t listen to me? At age 15, I had three priorities: a) get a boyfriend or husband, b) leave home, and c) become a newspaper journalist. If I could visit my 15-year-old self, I would plead with her not to put the goals in that order.

Maintaining the boyfriend and/or husband would repeatedly derail the pursuit of my career over the years, and in the end, neither one of the men I made so many sacrifices for turned out to be worth it. Staying closer to family would have made so many things easier. I chose difficult, frustrating, expensive, damaging romantic entanglements in a town where I have no roots or mentors over parents who lived in career hotspot cities who would have let me live at home for free, and subsidized my education and career search indefinitely.

If I had just stayed home! In Richmond, there were very limited opportunities to become a newspaper journalist while my parents lived where there were multiple daily papers, as well as weeklies and specialty publications, and huge tourism industries in need of publicists and marketers. If I had not locked myself into a less than ideal marriage with a person who wouldn't relocate, I could have expanded my job search to Anywhere in the Entire United States. Somewhere, I just know, there would have been a newspaper or PR job to be had when I was in my twenties, and I could have launched my career 20 years sooner and had that much more experience by now.

Once that was in place, there would have been plenty of time for boyfriends or husbands and children, and probably better choices, too.

Looking back at my life, I can’t believe I didn’t choose that…and for what?! A mysterious temporary chemical reaction called love? That passes, you know. There is no one I was in love with back then that I still love or even miss. Love bubbles up anew at each turn in the road. Or maybe it's just because now that I am the same age my parents were when I left them, I can imagine myself getting along with them. Why couldn't I be the person I am now back then? Things sure look different looking back.

The Myth about Death Panels

The New Yorker, Aug. 2, 2010, "Letting Go," by Atul Gawande

Anyone concerned or inflamed about Obama's "death panels" or pulling the plug on grandma needs to read this article. The question is not about giving the medical profession and health insurers the right to pull the plug on grandma. The question is why do you want your grandma to die a long, suffering death, with, as Gawande writes, chemo in her veins, tubes in her throat, fresh sutures in her flesh, and swaddled in diapers?

Medicine can only go so far, and we as patients do not let our doctors be honest with us about science's ability to prolong our lives, or what the cost --physical, emotional, and financial -- will be to achieve a little more time -- or more often no actual quality time at all.

Studies have shown that there is no difference in survival time between hospice and hospital patients for the majority of fatal illnesses, and in fact, hospice care extends survival. Plus, you're more likely to be in less pain because hospice care involves comfort levels of drugs, less invasive interference, and all the comforts of being home.

In a program where terminally ill patients could choose hospice care in addition to invasive curative care, 70 percent chose the double coverage, and ultimately also chose to go to the emergency room half as much, and spent two-thirds less time in ICUs. Overall end-of-life invasive care for this group was reduced by 25 percent. Among the elderly in that test group, time spent in ICUs fell by 85 percent. Satisfaction scores from patients and their families skyrocketed. A large part of hospice care is a caregiver making the time to talk to the patients about death, help them plan for their death, discuss what is really important to them as far as comfort levels and quality of life, and explaining it to their families. And in the end, the very sick or very old really want to talk more than have stuff done to them.

The patients receiving this "discussion care" actually suffered less, stayed physically capable longer, and interacted with their loved ones longer, than those in hospitals still desperately hoping for a miracle cure. Family members were less likely to suffer major depressions after the loved one passed, or feel guilty about not having done enough, or putting their loved one through too much medical torture. That's because they had the assurance their loved one had made the decision themselves.

Healthcare reform can fund this added "discussion care," but those against health care reform characterized these covered discussion care sessions as the "death panels" we all heard so much about. The misconception was it was the insurance companies alone sitting on the death panels, not the doctors, the patient, and the patient's family. The funding was ultimately stripped out of the legislation.

Dr. Gawande's article gives an example of an oncologist who spent six hours in sessions with the patient, the patient's family, and then the patient's father who was in denial about his son's brain tumor, just to reconcile the entire group into accepting a plan for the inevitable death of the patient. The oncologist said it would have taken five minutes to sign off on another futile two rounds of chemotherapy she already knew would not help, but that six hour investment of discussion time resulted in a good, final month where the entire family focused on being together and the patient was kept comfortable and functioning in hospice care.

It is truly tragic that political firebrands, in order to advance themselves into positions of power, have inflamed the population against a rational consideration of how best to die. Medical science is keeping us alive longer, but if you're in a comatose state, full of wires and tubes, surrounded by strangers who are poking you with needles all day, sleeping under fluorescent hospital room lights with code-blues going on all night in the hallways -- is that really what you want for grandma, or for yourself?

It's a long article, and some of it is brutal information about what it is like to watch someone die, but it is well worth reading, for your own future death planning, if not for grandma's.