Amen. I was the first responder to a home hospice patient who arrested right before I got there. She’d only been diagnosed a week before with cancer metastasized everywhere, so the family weren’t ready to let go. No DNR. Do everything, they said.
So I hauled this poor woman off her bed onto the hard floor, broke a couple of ribs with the first chest compression, kept breaking ribs as we went on, suctioned out the stomach contents that the compressions brought up into her mouth and airway - and this is CPR done correctly, for those who don’t know. Brittle, old, cancer-riddled, or blunt trauma’d bones break and keep breaking.
Kept getting pulseless electrical activity on the cardiac monitor. I am very grateful that the ER doctor called a halt as soon as we got there.
I wish that the family had not called 911 when they did. That they had sat with her, and told her they loved her, and held her until they were ready to let go, and washed and dressed her, and then called us. How many times do you want your mother to die?
In this case, I don’t think the dying woman suffered from what we did to her, that she was gone. But sometimes there is more lingering, maybe more awareness. And the family lost something too. But they weren’t ready, and maybe thinking that they did everything they could and that we did too is consolation to them.
That’s the rub. Some families think that if they don’t request “everything” be done for their loved one that they’ve “killed grandma”. I’ve been in situations where I very gently tell them that this is natural, we all die, let’s make grandma comfortable. I don’t get graphic, but I say, do we really want to put her through a full code? Is that what she would want? Myself, I would (and have) told my family absolutely not. Let me die peacefully if there’s no hope. And they know that I’m an organ donor, so please take what they (patients who would benefit) need if I’m brain dead and on life support.