Meet Mallory, the Founder & CEO of Viive. She’s in her late thirties, in the prime of her life. She’s a mom and a business owner, and not to mention a professional singer on the side. She lives for a good pizza slice and a nice glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
She’s the last person you would ever expect to end up spending a week in the hospital out of the blue. And yet, that’s exactly what happened to her last winter.
If you’re a regular reader of the Viive blog, then you will already have read all about Mallory’s adventure in last month’s post. But if you’re unaware, here’s a quick recap: after dealing with one of the worst headaches of her life, Mallory collapsed with stroke-like symptoms in the middle of the night. She was numb on one side of her body; she could barely talk. She was rushed to the ICU and given emergency treatment, and after about a week, she was eventually diagnosed with an extremely rare kind of migraine that essentially causes neurological injury (yes, that can happen!).
Thankfully, Mallory is on track to make a full recovery from this incident. In the months since then, she’s been doing lots of rehab and physiotherapy, and is feeling much better than she was.
But facing a life-threatening emergency in your thirties really makes you re-evaluate things. Nobody thinks that something like this is going to happen to them at this age—even people who, like Mallory, are making a career out of Aging & End of Life Planning, and thus spend most of their waking hours thinking about worst-case scenarios. That much became very obvious when talking to the other patients in the hospital.
“While I was on the neurological rehabilitation floor, I ended up chatting with a lot of patients and caregivers, and really saw how underprepared a lot of people were for the situation they were in,” Mallory recalled. “And I don’t mean unprepared for having a stroke—nobody sits around preparing themselves for something like that—but around things like, not knowing what their loved ones would want in terms of medical interventions. It was direct evidence right in front of me that people really aren’t talking about these things.
“In the end they all figured it out, but they also probably had a lot of trauma that they wouldn’t have otherwise—things like adult children having to make really stressful decisions for their parents, and sometimes maybe choosing options that their parents didn’t agree with. It was tough to watch that and see the fallout from that as well.”
This year, April 16 is Advance Care Planning Day. According to Advance Care Planning (ACP) Canada, 80% of Canadians agree planning for their future healthcare is important—but only 17% have actually taken the step of drafting an Advance Care Plan.
That means fewer than one in five Canadian adults are covered in situations like Mallory’s. That means people having to make literal life-or-death decisions on behalf of a loved one who’s no longer able to advocate for themselves. Most of them don’t even realize they’re underprepared… until it’s too late.
Here’s the thing about Advance Care Planning: You don’t need it—until suddenly, you do. An Advance Care Plan, like so much of the work that falls under the Aging & End of Life Planning umbrella, is something that you ideally won’t need to think about pretty much at all in your day-to-day life. That’s why it’s so easy to put it out of your mind. Like an emergency savings account or various kinds of insurance, it’s something that you mostly just keep in your pocket for a rainy day.
But when the need for an ACP does arise, it’s difficult to overstate how important it is to have one prepared. It is the best tool you have to save yourself and your loved ones from unnecessary hardship down the road, should disaster strike (God forbid).
We can’t control the curve balls that life throws at us, but we can control how we prepare ourselves for them. “Things are still going to be challenging. Bad things are still gonna happen in life,” says Mallory. “But we can make it so that you can get through those bad times a little bit easier.”
In her case, an Advance Care Plan meant that her loved ones already knew ahead of time exactly what Mallory would and wouldn’t want in terms of life-saving medical care. Unable to speak or think properly because of her symptoms, she wasn’t left in a position where she’d have to make serious decisions under pressure, and then try to somehow communicate with her family and medical team about her wishes were. She and her loved ones already knew the plan—so they could focus on just responding to the scary situation in front of them.
It is never too early to start Advance Care Planning. No matter how young and healthy you are, the unfortunate fact of life is that things can change in an instant. But if they do, you can give yourself and your family the gift of preparedness.
Visit the ACP Canada website for all the information and materials you need to draft an Advance Care Plan.
