Matters of Life and Death Essay

In a new book, A Miracle and a Privilege, Dr Francis Moore, 81, of Harvard Medical School, discusses a lifetime of grappling with the issue of when to help a patient die. An excerpt Doctors of our generation are not newcomer to this question. firing back to my internship days, I can remember many patients in pain, both(prenominal)times in coma or delirious, with late, hopeless cancer. For many of them, we wrote an order for surd medication morphine by the clock. This was not talked ab break through openly and elfin was written about it. It was essential, not controversial The best way to cause the hassle into focus is to describe two patients whom I cared for.The first, formerly a nurse, had sustained a fractured pelvis in an automobile accident. A a few(prenominal) day later her lungs facemed to fill up, her urine stopped, her heart developed monstrous rhythm disturbances. So there she was in coma, on dialysis, on a breathing machine, her heartbeat maintained with an elect rical device. One day after(prenominal) rounds, my secretary said the husband and son of the patient wanted to see me. They told me their wife and mother was obviously discharge to die, she was a nurse and had told her family that she neer wanted this kind of terrible death, being maintained by machines.I told them that while I respected their view, there was nothing intrinsically fatal about her situation. The kidney failure she had was just the kind for which the artificial kidney was most effective. magic spell possibly a bit reassured, they were disappointed. Here was the head surgeon, seemingly persistent to keep everybody alive, no matter what When patients start to get very sick, they a good deal seem to fall apart all at once. The reverse is in addition true. Within a few days, the patients pacemaker could be removed, and she awoke from her coma. About six months later I was again in my office. The brink opened and in walked a gloriously fit woman. later some cheer y words of appreciation, the father and son asked to speak to me alone. As presently as the door closed, both men became quite tearful. All that came out was, We want you to know how wrong we were The second patient was an 85-year-old lady whose haircloth caught fire while she was smoking. She arrived with a deep burn, I knew it would surely be fatal.As a remarkable coincidence, there was a similar going on at the time in medical morality, given by the wife of an official of our university. She asked me if I had any sort of ethical problem I could bring up for discussion. I described thecase and asked the students their opinion. After the discussion, I made a remark that was, in retrospect, a in force(p) mistake. I said, Ill take the word back to the nurses about her, and we depart talk about it some more before we decide. The instructor and the students were shocked You mean this is a real patient?The teacher of ethics was not accustomed to being challenged by reality. In any event, I went back and met with the nurses.A day or two later, when she was making no progress and was suffering terribly, we began to back off treatment. When she complained of pain, we gave her plenty of morphine. A massive plenty. Soon she died quietly and not in pain. As a sound physician, you had better move ahead and do what you would want arrogatee for you. And dont discuss it with the world first. There is a lesson here for everybody.