My Mom lived almost a year after her disease progressed to end stage. She was in the hospital quite a bit during that year. She lived with me and one morning I woke and found her unresponsive. We called an ambulance and she flat lined on route to the hospital. The paramedics performed CPR and intubated her and she survived. She had a DNR but the ambulance said they had no record of it so they had to save her. The look on my Moms face when she woke was unbearable. Her wish was to die and we let her down. We promised her she would never be intubated again. She never came home from the hospital because she went into respiratory failure again and we let her go. Death from COPD isn’t hard on the patient because the CO2 builds up in their brain and they lapse into a coma. The loved ones however suffer greatly. I hope this helps.