She Says The Worst Part Of Being A Nurse Is Watching Families Keep Their Loved Ones Alive Even Though They Are Clearly Suffering
This woman works as a nurse and has been working in the profession for 11 years. She currently has a patient that she cares for who is in her late 80s.
The patient has severe dementia, cannot sit or stand up, and can’t move much while lying in bed.
She acknowledges that the patient is a wonderful and caring person with some sass and amazing wit.
This particular patient puts her arms around the nurses in the form of a hug, and she often says that they are the greatest people to have come into her life.
Her patient is intensely hungry often, and she deeply wishes that her family would visit so that they could eat food together. The patient is incredibly small and skinny.
“When she came in, it was because she was choking on food. They were already putting her through dialysis, and speech found that she was aspirating everything, no matter what it was. So, she’s strictly NPO–nothing by mouth,” she said.
The patient’s family gathered together, and the nursing team met together separately to go over the options. Then, the family came to a decision to put a feeding tube in.
When the patient’s family informed the nursing team of their choice, the patient had taken out her IV and bled a lot.
She joked with both sarcasm and frustration with the nurse practitioner that she was positive the feeding tube would go over smoothly.
gpointstudio – stock.adobe.com- illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
As she predicted, the feeding tube has been a struggle. So far, the patient has pulled out the feeding tube on one occasion. To prevent her from doing this, they have her in restraints at all hours.
“She has too many extremely dangerous tubes and lines that could be pulled to be allowed to use her hands. She has a dialysis catheter in her neck–she could pull it and immediately die, bleeding out everywhere,” she explained.
There is the option for the patient’s family to visit and be in the room with her so that she can take breaks from being restrained, but the patient’s family members don’t visit much.
Sadly, the patient pleads for food, but the nurses can’t give her food. The patient receives nutrients through her feeding tube, but it doesn’t make her feel less hungry.
A couple of weeks ago, her patient’s breathing has dramatically improved. Her vitals are wonderful, but she pants a lot.
She decided to call the emergency rapid response team because it hurt her to see the patient struggling so much. However, it wasn’t necessarily a medical emergency.
“She was put on high-flow to help the work of breathing by pushing the air into her. The family was called again to try to discuss the goals of care. Now, she’s finally DNR, but she’s not palliative. We still can’t give her what she wants–to taste some food, to be with her family, who rarely comes. So, we sit with her, and she holds our hands and gives us hugs,” she shared.
One night, the patient had an apneic episode during her sleep. She sat and watched over the patient during the episode, even though she wasn’t her patient at the time.
Her heart breaks when she knows patients are dying without family there beside them.
Then, the patient opened her eyes and said, “‘Don’t cry. I’m alright.'”
While she wasn’t crying at the time, she wondered if the patient was aware of something that she wasn’t.
Throughout the years working as a nurse, she feels like her heart is “cold and dead.”
However, she hasn’t been able to get this patient off her mind, as well as other patients she’s seen whose families chose to keep them on life support while the patients were clearly suffering.
She knows that the doctors where she works are amazing, and they always inform families about what it could mean for patients to have feeding tubes, be on dialysis, be in restraints, and be in the hospital for long periods of time. The families are always given all the information.
In her view, these families are self-centered.
Her job has made her concerned about being elderly, and she wonders who will make these types of decisions for her when she can’t for herself. She is child-free and doesn’t have siblings younger than her. Also, she doesn’t think she will ever get married, and she doesn’t date much.
After reflecting on all of this, she planned to write a living will and hand it out. She has a small family, and she wants to be able to have trust in her family members that they will care for her and do as she wishes. However, she doesn’t feel like she has faith now.
How would you feel if you were in her shoes?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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