I am currently on the medicine wards. And, well, I have never seen such sick people in my life. Metastatic breast cancer, end stage cirrhosis, horrible obesity. We only had one patient die this week. We were discussing the patient in rounds, and the resident made the announcement that the patient was "actively dying."
This is a real term. "Actively dying." And even after the patient had passed, the family was still asking about interventions.
"Could our family member get CPR? Maybe a pacemaker?"
Pacemakers don't work on dead people, but that actually is not the sad part. I feel like that exchange represented a terrible disconnect between the living and the dying. Even though this patient was DNR, the family didn't understand that that meant, essentially, let the family member die in peace. Not with someone breaking ribs to administer proper CPR. Not with a code being called and a million people descending into the room and chasing away all of the patient's loved ones in their final moments together. Not with four large bore IV's being placed simultaneously.
Denial is always profound in family members faced with the looming death of a loved one. Trauma at Parkland taught me that. But it doesn't help that our medical institutions are equally uncomfortable with saying, yes, this is it. We have nothing left to offer you. Please, if you want the best for your loved one, let us hang a morphine drip, make them comfortable, and pass in peace.
Honestly, that's how I would rather go. No three week stays in the ICU on a ventilator and pressers for me.
Hope is a powerful drug even when it's false. There are studies "out there" that have analyzed those who face death with the hope of life to come (the "up there" life as opposed to the "down there" life) and those who have no hope—period. What is it about the human psyche that cannot bear the thought of total annihilation at death? Dying is one thing, ceasing to exist is another. Death can be seen as a doorway into another world or simply the cessation of all that one one was and will ever be. I prefer false hope even more than a morphine drip. The former deals with a far deeper pain that the latter can never touch. Enough blah blah. I applaud you, daughter, for wrestling with the life you've been given.
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