Hard Choices and How Telehealth Opens Up The Options

By Natalie Sloane, Marketing Coordinator

Almost everyone is making adjustments and difficult choices. Our healthcare system is figuring out how to deliver care in this crisis and how to protect its caregivers on the front lines. Parents are figuring out how to juggle home schooling with remote work. Restaurants are figuring out how to pivot to take-out model. The list of hard choices people around the world are making is already massive and continues to grow everyday.

People are making these daily and even hourly choices with an understanding of how their choices may impact someone else in their community. This idea of making choices through a very restrictive lens is a parallel to the clients we serve daily.

The people we serve through phone-based outreach are the vulnerable ones. They’re the same people we are self-quarantined to protect. For them, social distancing was already a way of life. They face hard choices when it’s too cold, icy, too hot, flu season, when a family member is sick, when they don’t have support to aide them in getting around.

The pandemic has highlighted for me the role of choices in our everyday lives. It can seem like our worlds are getting more constrained. Yet my work as a Specialist reminds me about the power of perspective: Our worlds can actually be expanded by asking questions like: ‘how do we want to live within these parameters?’

Changing your perspective from seeing limitations to seeing options is like looking at a patch of moss with a microscope only to realize it’s a vast forest.

These “perspective” conversations are the questions our Specialists pose in the thousands of phone calls we have with our medically vulnerable clients.

To realize that you always have a choice — even if it seems to be between a rock and a hard place — is empowering.

In this time of adjustment and introspection I think about my choices: I recognize that I expected to always have access to healthcare, availability of medical staff and equipment, and a system ready to help me. Access to groceries was taken for granted, too. But that is no longer the case.

The pandemic invites everyone to begin to think differently – whether by choice or not. The pandemic encourages us to have a plan B, to know that we’re not immune, to learn to care for ourselves and each other a bit differently.

The pandemic has made me endlessly grateful that we can continue serving those with serious illness without interruption. This is because since our inception, our services have been delivered 100% by telephone and video sessions. I’ve gleaned a lot from our clients who have already learned about adjustment and ‘social distancing’ with humility and am appreciative for this wisdom now.

I am curious to see how humanity responds to the invitation to put others before ourselves. I think about Labri Siffre’s song ‘Bless the telephone’, which summarizes my emotions well. It’s not only a privilege to have an established telehealth service, but to be able to connect those we serve with social workers and counselors from diverse work backgrounds at times like these – it is a gift. Our team at Vital Decisions are Specialists in Advance Care Planning and aligning care with one’s goals and values. We are trained to talk about difficult decisions and choices, we are a team of people that are intrinsically compassionate, empathetic, and wanting to serve.

We are all navigating times of great change and while social distancing is the imperative I will follow, I am especially honored for the ability to continue to connect in very meaningful ways with those we serve.