I am enjoying my time off this week surfing blogs when I came upon this entry at The Happy Hospitalist. It brought back many memories as a floor nurse during codes at the hospital. Most of them the very same as the author of this wonderfully succinct post.
I absolutely agree with "Don't You Dare Touch Me" on so many levels. I've had many discussions with family members over whether or not to code their loved ones. I remember discussing the worsening condition of a patient to his daughter who insisted that we code her 93 year old father. The poor man was a pile of bones with no memory left due to endstage Alzheimer's who wouldn't survive a code to begin with. I was so fed up that I asked her when the last time she actually visited her father was. Total silence, of course. I asked her to come and see what the actual condition of her father was before she insisted that we put him through the trauma of a futile code.
She actually came and visited her father and thanked me for the frank discussion. She met with her fellow family who had been here for the last few days and realized that their father deserved to be comfortable in his last days with family in attendance.
