An 80-something year old Patient has been at Chicago Memorial's ICU for close to two weeks now. Patient has been demented to the point of being legally incapacitated for at least the last four years. Patient has congestive heart failure, renal failure, and arrived with a collapsed lung because there was so much gunk in the lungs. Nurses have been removing not just secretions, but wads of mucus for over a week via suction, and there's a lot that even the suction can't even get out. Patient has coded, been intubated, was extubated, coded again, intubated again, extubated again, coded again, and has again been intubated. All the while there is NO advance directive from the family, who just sits there and looks at Patient plugged up with tubes. There is absolutely nothing that medicine can do except kept Patient alive by inches. The only way this poor patient will stay alive is via a ventilator (ever try moving hooked up to one of those things?), and if, only if, the lungs happen to clear up Patient will go back to a nursing home to lie in a bed, still demented...
Madness and cruelty! Perhaps it's countertransference, but I would never let my grandmother or either of my parents be subjected to that.
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