Will workshop draws 400

BANGOR ? Many of the more than 400 people attending a public workshop on living wills Wednesday evening left with a completed document in their hands.

The free workshop at the Spectacular Event Center was the first of its kind in this area, and organizers said the high attendance reflected people’s interest in controlling their end-of life care in the wake of the highly publicized case of Terri Schiavo. Schiavo spent years in a persistent vegetative state in a Florida nursing home and was the subject of an intense political debate recently when her husband and her parents disagreed about discontinuing her feeding tube to allow her to die.

Dawn Simpson, a social work manager at Eastern Maine Medical Center, said people from as far away as Lubec, Dexter and Blue Hill called to express interest in attending the workshop and completing living wills, more accurately called advanced health care directives. The workshop was sponsored by EMMC, St. Joseph Healthcare, Ikon Copiers and the Bangor Daily News.

Advance directives enable individuals to specify the end-of-life care they want to receive, including resuscitation, pain control, ventilators and feeding tubes ? and under what conditions, if any, they want such interventions discontinued. Individuals also may appoint a friend or family member to make decisions on their behalf should they become incapable of making or communicating their own wishes. A separate document, included in the packet distributed at Wednesday’s workshop, allows people to express a desire to donate their healthy organs to waiting recipients.

Helen Dunham and her husband, Harland, drove over from Ellsworth. Helen Dunham’s elderly mother died recently, she said, and decisions about her end-of-life care were complicated. “It would have been so much easier if she had an advance directive,” Dunham said.

Bangor resident Gertrude Robinson, 73, came and brought a friend. Her three daughters, she said, aren’t comfortable talking about end-of-life issues.

“I tried to talk to them about my funeral arrangements, but they didn’t want to get involved,” Robinson said. “So I just went out and did it all myself ? picked out my casket and everything.”

Robinson, still hopeful, decided to take home the advance directive forms provided at Wednesday’s workshop and review them with her daughters before filling them out.

“I want them to know what I’m going to do,” she said firmly.

Participants at the event listened to a panel of professionals talk about the legal, medical, social and religious controversies that can arise around the end of life ? controversies they all agreed could be minimized by straight talk with friends and family, careful consideration of individual values and the completion of a legal written document. These things are best undertaken well in advance of a medical crisis, according to physician Donald Krause of St. Joseph Healthcare.

Any expression of an individual’s end-of-life wishes is better than none, panelists told participants at Wednesday’s event. But a written statement is more likely to be honored than a verbal one, and a formal document that has been witnessed and notarized is the least likely to be contested by family members or others.

After the panel discussion and a question-and-answer period, participants were able to sit in small groups to fill out their advance directives with guidance from a cadre of attorneys, clergy and clinicians who had donated their time to the event. Notaries also were available free of charge.

Dr. Eric Steele, chief of medicine at EMMC’s corporate parent Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, said Wednesday’s advance directives workshop was so successful that area residents can expect to see others, both in the Bangor area and in outlying communities. Official advance directive forms are available online at www.emmc.org.