Badly injured and dying patients suffer in ways we cannot appreciate. Words like futility and dispair are almost impossible to understand at the bedside. But, at some moment in your life you may be called on to ease another's suffering in ways that seem like asssited death. Would you?
In my novel, "The Phoenix Prescription", Tim Voight is a training surgeon confronted by a severly burned trauma victim, Danny Ferrone, and the man's fiancee who is in a coma. Isolated by the Blizzard of 1978, Voight must make crucial medical decisions on his own. He's opposed by a powerful father figure and his own guilt about his brain-damaged sister. Enter the burn victim's brother, Tony, a Vietnam Vet who has seen his share of horror and who, in fact, is haunted by his own actions years earlier with a terribly wounded buddy. He's wracked with guilt about his war secret. Tony confronts his brother's overwhelming critical condition with ambivalence and a polar difference in attitude about his brother's aggressive ICU care.
What would you do in this circumstance? Uncertainty rides the emotional waves of complicated modern ICU care, luring you into believing that cure is possible when everything around you says differently. You see a loved on suffering, just as Tony watched his brother deteriorate, even after a major operation. How would any of us react in the face of this degree of suffering under the scrutiny of our jugmental gods? In our complex world of dangerous automobile travel, of aging baby boomers, and of new and strange diseases this dilemma surrounding end-of-life care will almost certainly confront us.
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My mother will be 80 on October 20th. She has many medical issues; one being that she cannot speak. She is now in a nursing home. I love her; but have asked the lord "Why must she suffer?" "What about her dignity?"
Kathy and I have made a promise to each other which we will share with our two children "someday" that if we ever are stricken with a terrible accident or disease that somehow someway we will leave this world with our dignity and spare our children and grandchildren the pain of watching their Mom or Dad or Mamma and Papa suffer and lose all purpose and dignity of life.
Bob
My brother slowly succumbed to cancer of the kidney and liver, I could not bear the anguish and the pain he suffered, and he too would have preferred to die minus the suffering. It is sheer agony and torture.
Cynthia