Time to Give Up

~ You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. ~

Beverly Sills

So far, I’ve heard a litany of “No”s in my search for a legal advocate for my mother’s catastrophe at the hands of a hospital (described here).

I’ve learned a lot about the essential failure of the medical advance directive. I’ve learned that in the 20 years since the United States endorsed the advance directive as the means to protect our right to make our own end-of-life decisions about medical care when we are unable to speak for ourselves, we still don’t have a viable way to ensure our decisions will be honored.

I’ve learned that when an elderly, incapacitated person—one of the very people federal and state statutes seek to protect—is put into a hospital without an advocate present, that hospital may violate her civil rights, violate federal and state regulations, diregard her legally expressed advance instructions, treat her based on liability issues rather than her true best interests, and do whatever they choose to prolong her life. The hospital may do so with certainty that it will not be held accountable by any government agency or court of law.

Do I give up? Do I let the litany of “No”s defeat me?

I’m struggling with that decision. Part of me believes that I ought to cease fighting and accept the situation. Part of me believes that giving up is not the right thing to do.

If Thomas Edison had given up when yet another experiment failed, we wouldn’t have electricity and lights to read by at night. If Martin Luther King Jr. had given up when yet another civil rights case died in court, what would have happened to the civil rights movement?

It doesn’t appear that injustices are corrected because everyone suddenly realizes a wrong should be righted. And changes don’t occur just because they’re needed.

There’s a possibility that God might be telling me something in the disinterest of lawyers to stand up for my mother and say she was mistreated. My hubby thinks that might be the case. There’s a school of thought in a chapter in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous, that if we are disturbed by a situation, we need to accept that situation as being exactly the way it should be right now.

But I have a niggling feeling that a wrong is perpetrated on people like my mother, and if I give up, the status quo won’t change.

So I struggle with my disappointment, and I keep on sending emails, making calls, researching the law.