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| The MICU consisted of 12 large rooms, wrapped around a busy nurses' station. Inside each room lay an extremely sick patient surrounded by a confusing array of pumps and monitors incessantly beeping. A solemn-faced visitor often sat at the bedside.
Doctors, nurses went in and out. They were busy, on the move. Gene Moore landed in 979, a corner room with a large window facing the nurses' station. Because of the risk of infection, everyone had to put on a gown, gloves and mask to enter his room and take them off on leaving. Mrs. Moore usually sat in a chair next to her husband's bed, waiting for a good word from a doctor. Something, anything, to sustain her, to give her hope. Perhaps his creatinine level was up, or some other obscure measurement she didn't understand. Mr. Moore didn't have a living will - a legal document stating his preferences for end-of-life treatment - because he thought, incorrectly, that a will would take the decision-making out of his wife's hands and give it to the doctors. Mrs. Moore and Ron believed they would be in control. |
"We are his living will," she said. But Mrs. Moore didn't understand what was happening, even though the doctors and nurses were very pleasant and answered all her questions.
"I just don't know what to ask," she said. How could she decide what was best? "You just don't know how far, how much to let him go through," Mrs. Moore said. "He has been to hell and back. He's had so many blood tests. His arms are so scarred they can't even get a needle in." So she sat, hour after hour, day after day, beside her husband. He lay there, unresponsive, somewhere between life and death, while she passed the time doing the most ordinary things: reading him poems, planning vacations, mulling recipes for baked lobster Savannah. She wanted to believe he would return home again, soon. After all, almost 80 percent of the 700 or so patients treated in Penn's MICU each year leave alive, so why not her husband? |
Wendell Kennedy and family knew Rose Kennedy's chances were grim. Mrs. Kennedy, 75, had had a stroke while getting ready for church. The next day her living will turned up in a dining room drawer. |
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