Sarah Carey

But unless you write that down, we all face the prospect of being in hospital and being incapable of expressing our wishes.

And then our families are fighting over what happens to us.

And I think a classic case is the elderly parent in unit of adult children.

And one of them is saying, and actually I witnessed this in a family once and the treatment was completely futile and really, really aggressive.

It was terrible.

And, you know, one of the adult children was saying, stop, they'd never want this.

But the others were saying, no, no, it could work.

And it was awful.

And of course, you know, the person eventually died anyway.

So I've seen these play out.

So again, it's really important to put in writing what your wishes are because you may not be in a position to express them.

And the other one is children and small babies are put through a huge amount.

And again, you can really, really understand that why a parent may not want to be able to let go.

But so doctors talk about having this difficult conversation.

But when I researched the column a bit more, I was absolutely shocked.

The Irish Hospice Foundation

said that two thirds of people are not told by their doctors that they're actually dying.

So they're in no position to make a choice.

And I thought that was really, really shocking.

And families will collude too in concealing from a relation what the terminal diagnosis is.