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My living will, Jake Tapper and Brian Goldman

— 03.29.2020 10:37 AM

A living will is sometimes called an advance care planning document, or an advance directive. I call mine a living will, like the Americans do.

Basically, it’s a document that describes the care I would (and would not) want to receive if I’m not able to communicate my wishes about medical treatment.

My Dad had one, and he suggested we all get one, too. He was a doctor. He used to take me and my brothers to the hospital with him, sometimes, to gently remind us that sickness and death are part of the deal for all of us.

So, I got a living will. Originally, it was to give guidance to the love of my life and my youngest brother. But the love of my life dumped me, and my younger brother is far from where I am. (Everyone is far from where I am, these days.)

I got in touch with my estate lawyer, then, yesterday. He’s an amazing guy and a longtime friend. I told him I wanted my living will amended to specifically exclude the use of a ventilator or CPR when and if I get sick.

I decided to do that because of two people – Jake Tapper on CNN, and Brian Goldman on CBC. Truth.

I’m not friends with Jake Tapper, but I admire his journalism and his integrity very much. I periodically tweet funny stuff at him and he tweets funny stuff back.

A couple days ago, however, he had a New York doctor on his show and what the doctor said actually shocked me. The doctor said ventilators prolong “life,” but they don’t restore it.

Nobody ever really comes off the ventilators, he said. The clip is here, sent along by Jake Tapper. Around the four minute mark.

That shook me. I didn’t know that. I hadn’t heard that before.

Then, around the same time, Dr. Brian Goldman – the well-known CBC Radio doctor, and a friend who has given me advice that has helped get me through aforementioned difficult times – tweeted that, if he got sick, he would refuse a ventilator and/or CPR.

I thought about that for a minute, and then I tweeted: ditto. Use the machines on someone else. No heroic measures.

So, there you go. I told my daughter last night at supper, and now I’m telling you guys. None of my sons or brothers are around here to tell, so I’m telling you. I’m doing that to ensure it gets communicated to the right people at the right time, if needed.

Now, I’m pretty healthy. No health problems, no allergies, no headaches, no “underlying conditions” at all. I exercise, I eat right, I don’t do drugs, I dislike booze, I’ve never smoked, all that.

But this disease doesn’t discriminate. Young or old, rich or poor, healthy or not. So, if I get it – and, the available data suggests many of us will, eventually – I want the ventilators and doctors and nurses to focus their remedial efforts on more-deserving others. (If I get it bad, that is. Maybe I won’t. Who knows.)

Death is part of life, my Dad used to say to me and my brothers. So, if death beckons, all of you guys now know what I want, too.

You’re my living will. I’d shake your hand and thank you, but that’s not advisable in the current circumstances.

So it goes, I like to say.


Comments (17)

When Trump lies, someone dies

— 03.25.2020 08:43 PM

‪Two things.

One, every president is popular at the start of a crisis – even Carter was when Iran hostage crisis started. Then it gets bad.

Two, it will get very bad for Trump. The weeks he wasted with bullshit – which will result in Americans actually dying – will be what defeats him. ‬

In these dark days, if someone with power is lying, it means someone without power is dying.

Trump won’t be defeated by Joe Biden. He will be defeated by his own lies.


Comments (11)

My latest: defeating a silent, invisible foe

— 03.24.2020 09:02 AM

In June 2004, the young doctors in their sparkling white coats filed into my father’s hospital room, holding charts and papers.  They were there to tell him how they were going to save his life, and defeat the cancer that was throughout his lungs.

I was there, on a chair up against the wall of the room on the fourth floor of the Kingston General Hospital.  I looked at the faces of the young doctors.  I could tell that they all knew who my father was.

He was a doctor, like them, and he had saved lives in that same hospital for years.  He had taught young women and men how to be doctors, and he had gone on to be well-known across Canada, to be a Member of the Order of Canada, even.

From his hospital bed, my father let the young doctors speak.  They described the measures they would take to save him, to save his life.

When they finished, he spoke.  “Thank you, doctors,” he said, and he said that last word like it was important, because it is.  “But there will be no heroic measures in my case.  Thank you.”

And they all got up and shook his hand and filed out of the tiny hospital room.  He had been offered a better room, by the way, one with a better view of the shining, shimmering lake.  But he had refused it.

I had said nothing, even though I already knew what he would say.  I wanted him to say that he wanted to live, and that the young doctors should do everything else in their power to save his life.  I wanted him to say that he wanted to beat death.

But he didn’t.  He wouldn’t.  He’d seen the charts, and he had decided he would die.

And death is back and death is everywhere, this Spring.  It is on everyone’s mind, if not necessarily on their lips, as they sit in isolation all over the Earth, and as they listen to doctors on TV talk about “flattening the curve.”  The “curve” is sickness and, for some, death.

My father was an immunologist, you see.  He was well-schooled in viruses like the new one.  He was among the first to try and defeat AIDS, before it even had a name.

He’d come home and tell my mother and my brothers that this virus, if it was not stopped, would kill millions of people.  He’d have dinner with us, and then he’d sleep for a while, and then he’d go back to his lab, to try and stop AIDS.

As I have been in isolation in an old house in rural Ontario, receiving emails and texts from people who I know and people who I don’t – people who confess to me that they have never been so scared about anything in their lives – I often wonder what my father would say now, 16 years after we lost him.

After he had looked at the charts, and the data, and after he had talked to the other doctors, would he say that there are no heroic measures that can save us?  Or would he say to fight it, even against such an implacable, malevolent foe?  Would he say that we must do all that we can to defeat this remorseless, relentless virus?

Outside that hospital room, on that day, the sun was brighter than it had ever been in the history of the world.  And the tiny sailboats, arrayed against the blue-green waves of Lake Ontario, didn’t stop moving on the day my father died.  I had actually cursed them for that, because I wanted them to stop moving, in recognition of the passing of the greatest father who ever lived.

But inside that hospital room, on that day my father said he would die, there was a lot of fear, but not with him.  The fear was entirely mine.  Then, as now, I was afraid of death, and the invisible killer that was filling his lungs up, a killer that was silently working to ensure that he would no longer be able to breathe.

As we sat there, waiting for my mother to arrive, I asked him if he was ready.  “I am ready,” he said.  “I am ready.”

I have thought about it long and hard, and I think I know what my father would say, if he was still here.  After looking at the charts, he would look at all of us at the end of his hospital bed, our chests tight with terror, and he would say this:

“Fight it, beat it,” he would say.  “You can, and you will.

“You must.”


Comments (9)

Spring

— 03.19.2020 09:08 AM

It has arrived, today, earlier than it has arrived in years.

No welcoming of it at Stonehenge or Chichen Itza, this year. You know why.

Spring.

Yesterday, I drove up to Ottawa to get my daughter and her boyfriend. They have both lost their jobs. We all figured it’d be safer for them to be here with me in the County – in a little rural spot with less than 100 people in it – than in Ottawa.

Traffic was surprisingly heavy on the 401. Cars, but tons of trucks. Usually I curse trucks – especially when they drive too long in the passing lane – but not yesterday. They’re the ones carrying food to grocery stores. So we need them.

The Walmart parking lot in Belleville was packed. Driving by it, I wondered how many of the people inside were practicing social distancing. Not many, I reckoned.

Past Belleville, I listened to Trump’s press conference. The news was the closing of the border with Canada, and the spending bill. But it was Trump’s utter madness that came through.

It was the “Chinese virus,” he said. A vaccine is close, he said. “Total victory,” he said, his endsieg. He’s the “wartime president.”

His lies and prevarications were so many, and so distracting, I missed my turn and got almost to Cornwall before I noticed. If that Walmart parking lot and Trump’s press conference are any indication, we’re fucked, I thought to myself, doubling back.

But we won’t be. We aren’t.

My daughter and her BF were wearing masks and gloves, as I loaded them and their stuff into the Jeep. They wore ’em all the way to the County, too. They did what we all have to, now.

Spring.

Back home, I got in touch with friends and family. No one was dismissing the coronavirus anymore. They all are taking steps and being careful. They all acknowledged that they may lose things in the coming months – clients, business, maybe even some things they own – but they all sounded determined to keep moving forward.

And so must we all. A doctor I know, one not given to exaggeration, told me on Tuesday that this is a war, now. And it is.

Our parents and grandparents lived through a World War. The ups and the downs, the tragic losses, the enormous sacrifices, the dark cruelty and the shining humanity. They got through all of that, and they didn’t have the Internet or 500 channels or little computers they could carry around in their pockets.

They got through that war, and they built a better society. So, we are going to get through this and build a better world, too.

Am I going to get it? For sure. I feel it. Maybe I did when I gassed up in Ottawa yesterday, and I touched a bit of plastic or metal and then touched my face, without thinking. Maybe.

Maybe I will be one of the ones – the 15 per cent of the 80 per cent – who gets really sick. Maybe, maybe not.

What’s certain is this: Spring is here, and it will the darkest Spring of our lives. And then, at the tail end of it, things will get brighter again. They will, they will. I promise.

Spring has sprung. Go out and breathe it in.

It feels good.


Comments (5)

#Coronavirus: crisis comms in a crisis comms situation

— 03.13.2020 08:15 AM

Daisy Group has been around for almost 15 years.  Generally speaking, we are basically a war room for hire.  Specifically, we help folks through crisis communications situations.  Like coronavirus.

What has made things worse – what has made people anxious, and pushed them towards panic – isn’t the virus itself.  It’s how our supposed leaders have communicated to us about the virus.

Donald Trump has been in the news every day. He has ignored the threat, then dismissed it, then lied about it, then broadcast an address full of yet more lies and misinformation.  It caused a stock market crash and panicked people even more.

Justin Trudeau has done the opposite – he hasn’t been in the news much at all.  He has delegated communications to ministers who have zero experience handling a crisis like this, and his policy response – a billion dollars, a conference call with provincial Premiers – has been pretty puny.  He has essentially disappeared.  His wife may be ill, but Trudeau is a master of social media, and he knows how to reach people even when in isolation.  He hasn’t done so.  That’s caused some confusion and anxiety.

I teach crisis communications at the University of Calgary’s law school; I’m in fact teaching again today, via the Internet.  I have been using coronavirus as a case study for the entire semester.

Here is the story I will tell my students about how to communicate in a crisis like coronavirus.  It isn’t hard.  But our leaders need to do it.  Now.

At my Daisy Group, when corporate disaster strikes, we often refer clients to the Tylenol approach.  It’s an approach that works.  

Late 1982, Chicago: seven people are killed when they ingest Tylenols laced with potassium cyanide.  Johnson and Johnson, which owned the Tylenol brand, saw its share price plummet, and panic was widespread.

But the company didn’t disappear.  It did the reverse.  J and J immediately recalled all Tylenol, nation-wide. It ceased production.  It issued warnings to hospitals.  It announced that it was developing what it called “tamper proof” packaging – a phrase that has now entered the popular lexicon.  And, over and over, company executives made themselves available to the media, to answer questions, to describe the actions it was taking and – most of all – to take responsibility.

Johnson and Johnson didn’t poison its own Tylenol capsules, of course, and nobody believed that they ever would.  But the company’s willingness to be accountable, and to answer every question, generated tons of goodwill.  As the Washington Post wrote, admiringly, at the time:  “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster.”  After tamper-proof Tylenol packaging was perfected, and reintroduced in the market, Tylenol would shortly go on to become the most popular over-the-counter analgesic drug in the U.S.

For Messrs Trudeau and Trump, there’s a lesson there, if they want to heed it.  In politics, as in life, the communications rule is this: what gets you in trouble isn’t the mistake itself.

What gets you in trouble, instead, is dishonesty and exaggeration.  What gets you in trouble is pretending to be an expert, where you’re not. What gets you in trouble is basically disappearing (like Trudeau) – or being on TV too much (like Trump).

What gets you in trouble is pretending that the crisis isn’t happening.  And saying nothing.

Because coronavirus isn’t nothing.  It’s changing the world.  Right now, today.

Forever.

 


Comments (35)