This is not how it was supposed to happen.
I was working overnight when my pager sounded, alerting me to an admission to the intensive care unit. I logged on to the computer and clicked on the patient’s chart, scanning the notes that tracked his decline. First there was a cancer diagnosis, too far gone for cure, then surgery, recurrence, surgery, and finally, a discharge home. The elderly man had been found there earlier that evening, pale, feverish and too confused to communicate.
Now he was in the emergency department, his breaths ragged. “There’s no family around. We’re probably going to have to intubate,” the emergency room doctor told me when I called him to learn more about the patient. I sighed, wondering what this man would have wanted, if only he could tell us.
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