adventures in disaster

Are you thick?

I cannot stand it anymore. I am forced to believe that people are just thick, stupid, dumb.
If I as a health care provider told you that your loved one is a vegetable, paralyzed and will never EVER recover would you ask me every damn time you saw me "so how is she doing today? Any changes?" NO NO NO..no changes, still the same..still a goddamn vegetable..what the hell is your problem?
I get that the first fifty or sixty times we say something over a period of MONTHS you may not be hearing us very well..it's a shock blah,blah,blah but hey wake the fuck up! This patient expressly told everyone they knew they did not want to ever live this way and more importantly they wrote it down .
OOPs! too late! You waited too long. Don't bitch to me about it. You had months on the vent, months of lifesaving antibiotics, surgeries, procedures to pull the plug. You wanted all that so don't come crying to me now that he is a perfectly healthy vegetable that eats from a tube you surgically had placed and she breathes through a hole in her neck you demanded.
You were told right from the very first day he was doomed to be a nursing home patient without a thought in his head. You disagreed. Well, we were right and you were wrong and no we can't kill her off for you because you feel kind of guilty about the whole damn thing.

We told you we could stop treatment back when stopping treatment would actually mean something. What treatment would you like us to stop now? Food? or Water?

How about you take her home and look after her and make whatever choice you want okay?
You made us do unspeakable things to this patient when we knew they didn't want it and it had no value. We did it. You got what you wanted. Now take your pet rock home. Blissfully they wont care what you do. They have no functioning brain. We do and I would like to stop being a monster.
It's so easy to do creepy things when you don't actually have to do anything but sign a piece of paper, you make other people do your dirty work.
Your selfishness knows no bounds and now you reap what you have sown, congratulations.


Just because you fill out a form that says no heroic measures or turn me off if I'm no more than a plant doesn't mean your family has to honour your choice. Any nutcase in your family can challenge what you wrote and we will back down. All it takes is one whacked out daughter to keep you alive as a gorked out veggie tale in a long term care facility where interestingly this same idiot will never bother to visit.
It is disgusting and fascinating to see how quickly the most vicious don't let my daddy die contingent disappears once it is completely clear they should have let daddy die.
Even the most loving stop visiting pretty quickly.

However there is a terrifying other side. The martyr. The nutcase that sobs uncontrollably for months, hounds the staff, bitches and complains and demands to see the manager daily because "daddy looks dirty". The mad as a hatter munchausen by proxy gang that thrills to anything tragic. They will always know best, usually they are childless, still living at home, cat/tiny dog lovers working a menial job with way too much education in very bizarre areas.
In other words they have way too much free time.
My best advice about them is to agree that they are the smartest people alive, agree that they certainly could the job much better and promptly call social services and set it up. Send that patient home with the crazy person. Remember, the patient doesn't care and the nutter will get to feel really valuable for the very first time.Then they will blog about it, all about how dumb the medical staff is and how the nurses are all idiots and only they have all the answers and are perfect all the damn time. Ofcourse every time the patient gets sick they will wail and rush them off to hospital where we can save their fragile vegetable lives and crazy can take all the credit for the save.

posted by adventures in disaster @ 11:20 PM