Patient Thought For A Few Minutes example essay topic

In my career as a nurse, I have spent a great deal of time with the terminally ill. When you know that you have a debilitating disease and your prognosis is poor, you ponder the thought of death. Do I want to suffer? Do I want to have my family drained emotionally and financially? Is this going to be painful?

How can I be dependent on someone else to maintain by bodily functions? When faced with these questions, we become frightened. What if our disease causes us to lose all quality of life? Should we have the option to end our suffering by choosing a humane way of ending our life?

One of my dogs became very ill, and I took him to the vet. The vet ran tests and found that Rocky had a cancerous tumor. The prognosis: poor. The vet told us what to expect in the next few months. He gave us the option of putting him to sleep right away, or sending us home with medication that would keep him comfortable for about three months.

Well I bet if Rocky were able to make the decision, he would have opted to be mercifully medicated and peacefully die at that time. Instead I was thinking about myself. I could not picture our home without Rocky. I chose to extend his suffering for three more months with medication. Did I do this for me, or for Rocky?

Do we have the right to force human beings of sound mind to prolong their suffering? Or should we allow them the choice of dying with dignity, or more to the point, dying when living becomes unbearable. Should we allow a person to decide how much he or she can bear or do we become the morality police. We will take a suffering animal and put this poor defenseless creature out of its misery, but a human has to suffer until the last breath.

This is an ethical issue for physicians and health care workers. We are conditioned to preserve life at all costs. We can alleviate pain and suffering with strong narcotics, but they must be carefully administered so the patient does not become addicted to painkillers. Does this make sense? I remember having a patient with emphysema, this is a lung disease associated with heavy smoking.

You become very short of breath, until it is almost impossible for you to breathe at all. It is a very slow and uncomfortable dying process. The treatment is medication for comfort until you suffocate, or are placed on a respirator until all of your other organs fail. This patient was at the end stages of emphysema. He was panicking and gasping for breath. He was pleading with his eyes for help much like Rocky did.

I put a call into the doctor and he came in to see his patient. Dr. Pearl asked me to stand in as a witness while he discussed what options the patient had. There were two, the first one was to be kept as comfortable as possible with medication. As the doctor was explaining this option to the patient, he also explained to him that morphine decreases respirations and it is possible he may go to sleep and stop breathing. Then there was option two, placing a tube down his throat and hooking him up to a machine for as long as it takes for his organs to fail. He also explained that he would never be able to breathe on his own again.

Which would he choose? The patient thought for a few minutes and then he chose the morphine. Again the doctor reminded him it might expedite his death. He still chose the morphine. I walked out of the room with the doctor. He turned to me and asked, 'Do you have a problem with giving this patient 10 MG of morphine?' I thought for a minute, and I remembered the look in Rocky's eyes when we held him for the last time.

I said 'No doc not at all. ' When pain and suffering can not be eased with medication. When there is no quality left to one's life. If a person knows he or she is terminally ill and their agony will only get worse then yes, they should have the right to end the suffering. If this means their only option is death by euthanasia, their wishes should be respected.