The day before yesterday, the old mother was admitted to the ICU intensive care unit of the hospital for observation after nearly seven hours of hip revision surgery. As a family member, the author was able to escort in, and finally got a glimpse of the famous ICU intensive care unit.
Because the patient in the adjacent bed of the old mother was on a ventilator, the sound was extremely frightening. In order to appease the terrified mother, the author negotiated with the medical staff, hoping to change the bed. However, the answer was that, except for the old mother who was temporarily admitted to the ICU for observation due to surgery, most of the other patients were using ventilator intubation to maintain their lives, and they were all lingering, and it was the same wherever they changed.
It was only after being reminded by the doctor and carefully observed that the abnormality of those patients was discovered. This patient is not using a ventilator, but he is as thin as a skeleton, and his mouth is still open. I don’t know if I will have a nightmare when I see it at night. The patient was full of tubes, with a pair of huge gloves on his withered hands; another patient was on a ventilator, but his hands seemed to be tied to the bed rails…Unbeknownst to him, he interrogated the escort. The staff realized that whether they were wearing gloves or tied to the bed rail, the patient was extremely uncomfortable after intubation, and they were afraid that the patient would be unintentionally pulled and moved, which would cause life-threatening.
According to the doctor’s words, this so-called “life” extended by exhausting all kinds of medical technology is extremely painful. These patients are often subjected to painful CPR and surgical procedures, covered with tubes and hung from life-sustaining machines.
I don’t know how the patient will dominate his life if he is conscious and able to express himself? Are you willing to endure this torment of being unable to survive or die? Do you even want the most basic dignity of life?
Because of work, the author often contacts some elderly people who came from the war years. Some old men often say that they are the survivors of the war, and they are lucky compared to the fallen comrades. If one day he is critically ill, he will not be admitted to the ICU or intubated to avoid wasting national medical resources. The children have been instructed in advance to give up all-out rescue and “death with dignity in accordance with the laws of nature”.
Death is a kind of helplessness, but also a kind of inevitability. No matter whether you are a high-ranking ordinary citizen or a rich and powerful person, in the end, you have the same goal. We cannot choose life, but we can choose the way of death. In the last moments of life, can we give ourselves a last tenderness.
Death with dignity according to the laws of nature.
One point number, Wen Sheng Xiu Dao