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I began my medical training at Sydney University aged 50 - 32 years after qualifying for the degree straight out of school. It was the world’s longest gap year.
In the decades between, I cared for my husband who died from acute leukaemia at 24 and had a ‘good’ death, despite a horrific illness. I trained as a physiotherapist, later becoming a sports physiotherapist travelling with national teams to international sporting events. 

But after surgery to my cervical spine, doctors told me never to work as a physiotherapist again.

So, with three young children I began working as a high school teacher and later a Cancer Genetics Educator. My best friend at this time, Jane, had a debilitating neurological disease and I cared for her on and off over the next 20 years. I was so affected by her strength, bravery and positive attitude that I campaigned for better services and long-term accommodation for people with disabilities. I wrote a play about the complexities of caring called Mother Love that was produced in Melbourne.

Eventually I applied to study medicine as a post graduate degree, planning to work in palliative care. At the time I was stepmother to three children as well as mother to my own and after helping six kids through six HSCs I decided studying medicine would be easier.

Jane died just before I began. We were able to say goodbye and she told me I’d be a great doctor. I wore the blue pearl earrings she gave me to every practical and written exam for four years, and to my graduation. 
As a junior medical officer, I worked with people who were dying in hospital after years of chronic or even terminal diseases and who’d never considered they were going to die, let alone discussed it with their family. Each day I saw people without advance care directives, and families who’d never stopped to consider, or been advised to consider, what treatment their relative would want or not want. Each day, people came in from residential aged care with advanced dementia and aspiration pneumonias and treated with nasogastric tubes - and restraints so they did not pull them out.

So many people deny themselves a good death by not tackling it soon enough, if at all. They deprive themselves of some of the most loving and healing conversations.  Our medical systems often deny these things to our dying patients too, even if that’s not the intention.

Dying is not failure. It’s a time of transitioning that takes time and space for true transformation and deep healing to occur. Caring for someone who is dying is equally transformative. 

I have been heavily influenced by volunteer work overseas - especially in India where people die from painful fungating cancers without even access to morphine. But money does not buy a good death, just as it does not buy a good life. The things that motivate people to battle on and stay alive are the same all over the world: time for being with people you love, being true to yourself, making peace, or giving back in some form - even if it’s just teaching your children how to die well. These are universal, no matter a person’s finances or insurance.

I want Touchstone Life Care to be the spark that ignites real change in the minds of people, as well as in the minds of doctors and in our health systems. That includes educating people about advance care planning and encouraging them to create, share and store their own advance care plans.

Advance care planning is about having the most important conversations of your life, and making the most important decisions of your life. It is about finding out what is most important to you and sharing it with those who are most important to you.

Digital advance care planning will improve people's deaths. But it will also transform lives and families, and save millions of precious health dollars currently spent on expensive interventions that people may not choose if they took time in advance to think about it.