My mother had respiratory problems for 10 years before dying at age 63 of COPD. (Forty years of smoking.) She had a couple bad incidents when she was rushed to the hospital, and it was touch and go over those years.
On doctors orders, she and my dad quit smoking cold turkey, when she was 55-56, and they made it stick. Her condition seemed to have stabilized to some extent, so when she slipped away in the middle of the night, for my dad to discover when he woke up, it was unexpected but not shocking.
My dad had a variety of problems starting in his mid-fifties, including a perforated ulcer and a couple of bouts of cancer, but he made it through chemo and was essentially in full remission.
He had been clear about ten years when, just after his 75th birthday, it came back hard and fast. So he had about two months when basically he knew the schedule.
He had a "modified" DNR order; he didn't want any "high impact" physical resuscitation, and he said he wasn't going through another round of chemo.
His original cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was the first to recur and the doctors told us it's one of the worst cancers to have, because it spreads everywhere and quickly.
The last couple of weeks it got into his brain, which absolutely enraged him; he had always been razor sharp and intellectually brilliant, and it was falling apart day by day, and he knew it. Two weeks before his eventual death, he said, "it's time to go to hospice."
The last two or three days, he just shut down. No eating, hardly any liquids. He knew it was time.
I'm going to write a modified DNR pretty soon along with some other EOL preparations. Not that I feel like I'm imminently going to kick off, but an unnerving number of people in my family tree checked out at age 63, which I reach later this year. So it's probably time to figure it out.
