Respiratory Therapy 101: Just Keep Breathing

Despite my recent raving about Gomers and the frustrations that they bring to the healthcare world, I honestly feel a lot of sympathy for them. They’re feeble old people who should have been allowed to die with dignity, but who we are keeping alive for reasons I am unable to discern.  Terry over at Counting Sheep has made this point much more eloquently than I have. The last line here is exactly what I have been trying to say:

These are the lost people of our society, and they cannot speak for themselves: the crowning culmination of a life. lived. long. They come to our ORs to have feeding tubes inserted into their abdominal wall; to have their bedsores scraped and excavated; to have their broken bones repaired; to have months and sometimes years of neglect “fixed” so that they may return to exist. In a life without hope or happiness, only today, over and over again.

“Where do they all belong?”

This old, edentulous woman, this shriveled shadow of a man in the bed. Surely he once laughed, and dated; she married and bore children. She cooked; he worried about his family. She did the ironing and darned the family’s socks. He had opinions; he balanced the checkbook. She felt the hot sun on her head; the icy winter blast of wind braised his cheek. She lost her husband too soon; his children all moved away.

There is nothing we can do to save them from us.

How very true.