Monday, July 28, 2008
A Night of a Thousand Deaths
Another night at work, keeping the dead alive for another day or week or month...waiting for them to become really dead, not just mostly dead. And while waiting for their honest to gosh death we turn them every 2 hours and suction their mouths and gently, oh so gently, bathe their bruised and broken bodies that we have penetrated with ghastly devices intended to keep them alive; foley's and chest tubes and endotracheal tubes and nasogastric tubes and PEG tubes and central lines through which we pump the life sustaining drugs that keeps the blood moving oxygen to the dying cells and keeps their bodies alive and on earth for another day or week or month so we can turn them....
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1 comment:
Reading your piece is appropriate right now. I just finished reading Chocolat and a central theme of the novel was the avoidance of such a scenario. Two different charecters addressed the issues in different ways.
While theologians and politicians may argue about where life begins and ends and what weight do we give to the ill defined concept of quality of life none of us want to end up being the person you are turning as they await real death.
As I grow older and consider the ill way I have treated this vessel that carries me from the forceps to the stone I hope and pray that my terminal weeks and months are not spent as you have described. It makes a compelling case for those durable powers and do not resuscitate filings.
My life is spent with the emotionally damaged, the spiritually dying. Yours from the description is filled with at least some of the nearly dead, but not living. Both are hard, but yours is ultimately much more hard on the spirit I think. Occasionally I see a success story, not many, but some.
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