Pros And Cons Of Medical Directives

Patients are hooked up to machines and have no brain activity and yet. And yet the machine pumps their heart and inflates their lungs. A doctor who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander describes how most of his patients pass on: “Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, and hopelessly demented in a sterile hospital room.” (Goodman).The real question is: “Where is the dignity in that?” Though it is hard to understand for someone who has never had a terminal illness, even doctors understand it. They all say something along the lines of “If you ever find me like me that, just kill me.” (Goodman).

The so-called “right-to-die” has been debated for many years and only worsened
These documents are very vital when it comes to patients who cannot speak for themselves. It keeps family members with good intentions from making the wrong decisions and the patient from prolonged suffering (Bendiksen and Hammes). “Medical directives are life-savers, in their own way. And the sad part is, is that not many people know of their existence. There are many instances in my life where the lack of a medical directive led to some very unpleasant situations. I once took care of a man who drove his motorcycle directly into a brick wall without wearing a helmet. The impact crushed his skull and ultimately he was almost dead. But because his grandmother was out of town they hooked him up to a ventilator and used adrenaline to restart his heart until she got there. The catch was though that when the grandma got there, the parents still refused to unplug him. I mean, there was no way this man was coming back. He had dressings on his head that needed to be changed every two hours because 50% of his skull was missing! And then one day while I was on shift, I was near his room and heard the machine he was hooked up to go off. I got up to go help, but the overseeing physician just shook his head at me. So I ignored it. Turns out, the grandma got so fed up with him lying there that she just went in there and unplugged him herself. The doctors and his parents wouldn’t do anything so she did it herself. And that wasn’t the only time I witnessed that. It got to the point where I saw it so many times that when I heard it happening, I did nothing but shut the