Stroke of courage

What’s the point of having a ‘living will’ if doctors ignore it? That’s the question driving a new campaign for a law change. 

- PETER GRIFFIN

Draining and surreal. That’s how Louise Duffy describes the experience of watching her mother, 78-year-old Barbara Duffy, slowly become a skeletal figure in her rest home bed.

Barbie was rushed to Christchurch Hospital in October 2021, in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, after suffering a major stroke at her home in Methven, Canterbury. As emergency doctors worked to stabilise her, Louise, a marketing executive who lives in Martinborough, Wairarapa, sat nervously by the phone awaiting updates from Barbie’s partner, Peter Harper, a former teacher her mother had met later in life.

The word from the hospital was to wait 24 hours while doctors determined how serious the stroke was. Strokes affect about 9500 New Zealanders every year and are the most common cause of adult disability. Most people survive a stroke, which occurs when blood flowing to a part of the brain is interrupted by a clot or haemorrhage, depriving the brain of oxygen. But survivors can be left with a range of physical and cognitive disabilities.

Barbie feared suffering a major stroke more than any other illness that commonly afflicts the elderly.

“[Having a stroke] is her biggest nightmare,” a senior nurse at Christchurch Hospital wrote in Barbie’s medical notes on the afternoon of October 7, after talking to Duffy and other family members. It was the day after Barbie was admitted.

FORWARD PLANNING