I have returned! I haven't posted in a long time, but in the meantime I have accomplished quite a bit. I passed my senior comp exam, completed my senior nursing research paper, was inducted into Sigma Theta Tau International Society of Nursing, received a service award, and completed my independent study clinical night shifts on a step down telemetry unit. Phew it makes me tired just thinking about it! I have two weeks of class, one day (tomorrow) at the psych hospital, and a few addiction meetings (for psych), and two finals left in my undergraduate nursing education. Excitement is an understatement!
My clinical experiences this semester led me to contemplate our mortality in relation to modern health care. An overwhelmingly complex ethical dilemma for patients, families, nurses, physicians and all humans with access to modern medical interventions is deciding when a body can survive no longer. Imagine yourself these situations:
--> A person in the final stages of AIDS, appearing obtunded without verbal or visual response, receiving continuous FiO2 flow by thru trach, continuous feedings thru Dobhoff, +4 generalized edema r/t stage IV kidney failure due for hemodialysis.....listed as full code-would it be hard for you to perform the necessary interventions if this person coded?
--> A 100 year-old mother, very mentally sharp (memory intact, makes jokes, and maintains conversation), develops respiratory distress. What would you want to be done for her?
-->A 85 year-old husband, who has had 2 previous strokes and 13 TIAs in the last 5 years, is told that he needs hemodialysis. How would you feel about this?
What is the limit for our interventions for our bodily mortality? Where does the hope for preventing our inevitable mortality lie? Consider this:
"Man's resistance to death becomes evident: somewhere - people have constantly thought- there must be some cure for death. Sooner or later it should be possible to find the remedy not only for this or that illness, but for our ultimate destiny-for death itself. Surely the medicine of immortality must exist. Today too, the search for a source of healing continues...What would it really be like if we were to succeed, perhaps not in excluding death totally, but in postponing it indefinitely, in reaching an age of several hundred years? Would that be a good thing? Humanity would become extraordinarily old; there would be no more room for youth. Capacity for innovation would die, and endless life would be no paradise, if anything a condemnation.
The true cure for death must be different....What is new and exciting in the Christian message, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was and is that we are told: yes indeed, this cure for death, this true medicine of immortality, does exist. It has been found. It is within our reach. In baptism, this medicine is given to us. A new life begins in us, a life that matures in faith and is not extinguished by the death of the old life, but is only then fully revealed....Indeed, the cure for death does exist."
-Pope Benedict XVI, taken from the Magnificat: Holy Week 2011
Happy Easter Season!
