To be clear: Everyone dies. There are no life-saving medications, only life-prolonging ones. To say that anyone chooses to die is, in most situations, a misstatement of the facts. But medical advances have created at least the facade of choice. It appears as if death has made a counter-offer and that the responsibility is now ours.
In today’s world, an elderly person or their family must “choose,” for example, between dialysis and death, or a feeding tube and death. Those can be very simple choices when you’re 40 and critically ill; they can be agonizing when you’re 80 and the bad days outnumber the good days two to one.
It’s not hard to identify one of these difficult cases in the hospital. Among the patient-care team — nurses, physicians, nursing assistants, physical and occupational therapists, etc. — there is often a palpable sense of “What in the world are we doing to this patient?” That’s “to” and not “for.” We all stagger under the weight of feeling complicit in a patient’s torture, but often it’s the nurses who bear most of that burden, physically and emotionally. As a nurse on a dialysis floor told me, “They’ll tell us things that they won’t tell the family or their physician. They’ll say, ‘I don’t want to have any more dialysis. I’m tired of it,’ but they won’t admit that to anyone else.”
This sense of complicity is what makes taking care of these kinds of patients the toughest thing I do. A fellow physician told me, “I feel like I am participating in something immoral.” Another asked, “Whatever happened to that ‘do no harm’ business?”