dnr my a$$ if it looks like I need it.
Quick! Call the White Hut, this Nurse Kevorkian should be on the short list for Czar of Death Panels.
That’s the problem with these DNRs. When the time comes, you might not be able to sit up and say, hey wait! I want to live. Me, you better hook me up to any and everything, including the water hose and vacuum cleaner, and keep me around as long as possible. Give me just enough meds to keep any pain at a managable level but no more. I’ll be the one to decide when I’m gone, not some stranger.
Kaslin, thank you so very much for this post. It was quite disturbing to me. I believe every word of it, as I have seen it for myself as a nurse for 14 years. Nursing education is riddled with “the ends justify the means” ethics & the white-washing of Margaret Sanger’s legacy. There is little dignity & repsect for life left anymore. Why do you think the American Nurses Association is so supportive of Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, hmm?
Very sad & evil times we are living in. I now give anesthesia for a living, so I am no longer at the bedside of dying patients like I once was. There’s a flicker of regret in me about that. Some days I feel the need to go back to bedside nursing, if for no other reason than to be a pro-life example for our young nurses.
Thank you for posting. A very strange tale, which prompts divided feelings. On the one hand, Uncle Larry pretty much brought his death upon himself. And how many people did he kill, with an active sex life over the years he had HIV but “did not have [visible] AIDS”?
On the other hand, it’s a perfect description of “the system” in most of our hospitals. We were just talking about various delays and screwups in hospital emergency rooms that we or our family and friends have been subjected to over the years. And when my mother was in a Catholic nursing home, I don’t know how many doctors and nurses I spoke with if she had to go in for a hospital visit for treatment of pneumonia or the like, who sidled up to me and asked me to sign a DNR certificate.
One doctor after another would say, in doublespeak, “You’ve got to kill your mother to put an end to her suffering (and cut back on our expenses)!”
Every case is different, but I’m afraid that sort of attitude on the part of some of the medical staffers is all too common. Then, just as in this story, I would run into, for instance, a male Phillipino nurse with a huge medal of a saint around his neck—and he would be determined to help my mother out, any way he could.
bump
Thank you for posting this article.
The author has that knack for letting you ‘think’ about what you would do in that situation, instead of lecturing us.
And we all need to consider what we would ‘do’, because having Death Care Panels and Death Care Facilities is going to be MANDATORY with the new NATIONAL HEALTHCARE.
“What killed him?”
I am afraid if I had to objectively pick one thing that killed him, it was his advance directive.
Certainly not you or the hospice workers.
The Kevorkian nurse helped him to kill himself, it would appear.
That is the danger of signing an advance care directive. It can be interpreted as pleased. In what case would withholding food and water to a person NOT cause them to suffer? I guess if they were in a deep coma, and even then, who knows, they could be suffering. So that right there is something I’d never sign.
You didn’t fail your uncle. Your uncle failed your uncle. I think you really helped him at the end. He must have known you were there and you were trying.