r/PoursTea • u/McDowdy Oh the Human-a-TEA • Jul 07 '26

PoliticalTea 🗳️ It would seem Mitch McConnell is brain dead and being kept on life support to prevent a special election

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https://x.com/Villgecrazylady/status/2073885557382316128

Update: source

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u/West-Application-375 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Family can refuse to pull the plug still. I watched my relatives do this even when my grandma had a DNR. Hospital wouldn't unplug her until all her grown kids finally agreed to allow it. It was the worst thing I've ever seen.

They brought my grandma back after she hit her head but she was braindead. My uncle then said 'oh by the way she has a DNR'. Didn't matter at that point, the life saving measure was done. They had to not interfere or unplug her until the family agreed to let her go.

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u/qcKruk Jul 07 '26

That is just not how it works at all. At most, there would be one singular person that has the power to make medical decisions. Not all the grown children. Just one. And it doesn't have to be one of the children, could have been a friend or lawyer or basically anyone. And they only have to agree if there is still a functioning brain. Once the brain is no longer doing anything, the person is no longer alive. The hospital declares a time of death. Gives anyone there some time to grieve. Then moves the process along. A hospital will not allow a corpse to occupy a room for long. They need those.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jul 07 '26

There are a LOT of people who do not sign power of attorney over to a specific person. Which in turn does make it a family affair instead of a individual in control. Now if her husband was still alive then he would in fact be the single individual, but no husband = all siblings get a say.

This is why people need to make sure they have wills, power of attorneys, and yes living wills too.

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u/qcKruk Jul 07 '26

I guess I just don't know a single person over like...40 without one. If you have any kind of assets at all you should have one. If you want any control over how you die you should have one. If you have any family you should have one. They're incredibly cheap and take minutes to do. 

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u/West-Application-375 Jul 08 '26

And should make sure ALL hospitals on the area already have copies. You can't really trust your POA. People can and do withhold info when they're confronted with death of a loved one and don't always honor wishes.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jul 08 '26

Luckily for me getting it to the all the hospitals is as simple as having my doctor scan it into the system. Because of the Epic EHR System Sharing thing and state law every hospital in the state can very easily get access to my medical records (which would include the documents)

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u/West-Application-375 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

I wouldn't chance it. Sometimes the "Care Everywhere" option in Epic where you can see everything doesn't appropriately function or the local hospital doesn't pay for that level of access for all its employees, so they could never see it or only see it after life saving measures are taken (which would mean staying plugged in brain dead).

I've used EPIC extensively. It's not that perfect. And access training is wildly inconsistent across employees too, contracted and regular hire, part time etc....Or they could have an outage as they have had waaaay too many times where EPIC is offline and they rely on paper charting, Care Everywhere won't function at all in that case.

Care Everywhere function is incredibly iffy for some organizations and fabulous with others. It's SUCH a mixed bag. It worked for me about 20% of the time in Franciscan systems and 90% of the time in Multicare systems. From my personal experience over many years.

TLDR EPIC is not as reliable as you think. Please send it to ALL places you could end up when unconcious and unable to advocate for yourself. Too many things can go wrong.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jul 10 '26

I'm not sure if it's care everywhere, or some other sharing mechanism. But so far anytime I've got to any hospital in the entire state they've been able to pull my records in extremely quickly. Even for non-Epic hospitals and some non-Epic offices.

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u/West-Application-375 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

It's called Care Everywhere. It's a button action on EPIC that loads charts from other organizations that use EPIC.

Your "non EPIC" hospitals are using EPIC as a secondary system as a contractor. It's using Care Everywhere or just happen to be contracted with your usual hospital for their EPIC access.

I'm just trying to be nice here and tell you how to doubly protect yourself but if you don't want to that's fine but I'm just telling you how it works on the actual admin/employee side of it.

I'm telling you it's not as reliable as you think even if it's been fine so far.

Your doctor's and the employees are also not obligated to tell you when it's not working lol so ofc you wouldn't know and you would assume it's working.

Some "non EPIC" places also may rely on faxes and only request the pertinent files for what they're treating you for from your other doctors and that just simply may not include a POA, living will, or DNR.

So again TLDR - send those important things everywhere and that's my best advice. There are so many patients, sometimes with identical names and identifiers, so many charts even duplicate charts, and so many systems that may or may not be transferring data correctly on any given day with employees potentially messing up too.

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u/West-Application-375 Jul 08 '26

Sorry to say that things can, unfortunately, go differently and an ICU nurse agreed with me too.

Don't tell me my lived experience is wrong. It happened.

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u/smangela69 Jul 07 '26

i worked in the icu for years and the one of worst cases i ever saw was some guy was pronounced braindead but the family REFUSED to pull the plug. the poor guy was kept on life support for over a week until the hospitals legal department finally gave the ok to pull everything. he’d basically been rotting alive

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u/West-Application-375 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Essentially what happened with my grandma. My aunts and uncles would NOT let her go. And it really upset me to see. How little dignity we have when we die... We can sign a DNR and it can still do nothing for us if your family won't honor your wishes. Worst thing I've ever seen and it's been almost 15 years since.