Premature End of Life Care

I had returned to the Hospital following my longest-ever vacation, four weeks in Portugal and Southern Spain and was renewing my “management by walking around” skills when I dropped by our Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU).  There was a buzz in the air, a friend and colleague of mine had just signed-off as the physician of an 87 year-old woman who was intubated and had been on a ventilator for several weeks. 

This was a transitional time in the history of critical-care medicine.  We were moving from open to closed units.  At that time general internists were allowed to admit and care for their own patients with or without consultation with a pulmonologist or cardiologist. Inpatient medicine has evolved, and most MICU’s are now closed, and critical care specialists manage nearly all MICU patients. 

 The day of my visit was during the good-old days of the open unit.  My colleague caring for this elderly woman was an excellent general internist and a truly humanistic individual.  He had been confronted with a seemingly insoluble end-of-life crisis.  He, along with concerned medical and nursing clinicians, believed that her endotracheal tube should be removed so that she could die.  She was unresponsive and a feeding tube, intravenous lines and a bladder catheter were also supporting her.

When I learned that she had no physician, I volunteered to take over her care.  In my formal medical training in the 1960’s there were no critical care units.  Unstable patients were cared for in the usual four-bed rooms.  Curtains separated the beds, the respirators were primitive, but the nurses were the best, although not formally trained in critical care.

Standards have evolved over the last quarter-century:  the physical units changed and now patients have private rooms; there is one-on-one care by specialty trained and certified nurses; the physicians are Board Certified in critical care; there are clinical pharmacists who help manage complex regimens of medications; and respiratory therapists are on site. 

Importantly, healthcare ethics has evolved along with critical care, and the clinicians are familiar with ethical principles.  If necessary, expert consultation is available.  Families are encouraged to come to the bedside and to talk with the nurses and physicians. When I volunteered to help that day, a quarter of a century ago, critical care had impressively evolved, but most certainly not as far as today.

This woman posed an ethical dilemma.  The hospital staff agreed that the current care that was sustaining her life was futile.  Her three children disagreed and wished to continue the intubation, ventilation, nutrition and hydration.  The major family decision-maker was a physician daughter, an academic pediatrician, who lived an inconvenient distance from Portland.  The son was a postal worker and the other daughter was the caregiver for the mother.  Their home was in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood.  End of life decisions had been appropriately delegated to her family, as she had been unresponsive since her admission for pneumonia weeks earlier. 

That was the stage set as I opened the sliding glass door to her room.  At her bedside I confirmed her physical exam, and then I attempted to arouse her:  “Mrs. X wake up…open your eyes”.  There was no response.  I then took a hearing assistance device that resembles an old-fashioned hearing aid from the pocket of my starched white coat, placed the buds in her ears, hooked up the leads and turned it on. 

Again I asked, “open your eyes Mrs. X”, and this time she did.  She looked directly up at me, and I asked her what she wanted.  She bent her right elbow and put her hand to the endotracheal tube and motioned it forward.  It was obvious that she wanted the tube removed.  After consultation with the nursing staff, all agreed that she clearly had the capacity to make decisions for her self.  We did as she directed. 

After we removed the tube she was certifiably awake.  She went home and lived for many months with the care of her daughter and son.

Deafness is a major problem in the care of the elderly.  I have helped manage more than one patient who had been thought demented but instead were extremely hard of hearing, and who, like our seemingly comatose patient, had simply tuned-out of life. 

What Did You Do? Additional "Interesting" Patients

Each Tuesday morning I am honored to talk with patients at their bedside.  I am advantaged to see them after they have been stabilized and are thinking more clearly with less anxiety than immediately after the crises of their admission, and I am not obligated to take a complete history or do a complete exam; I may ask them non-urgent and seemingly irrelevant questions.  My go-to query is to ask what they did for a living, and if a work history seems unlikely, to ask them what they have done with their life.
Nearly all of the patients I see were born shortly before or during the post World War baby boom and are now in their seventies, most often they are retired.  Younger people on our wards often suffer from serious mental illness that has led them to practice the serious use of tobacco, alcohol or more dangerous street drugs.  
Over the years I have made brief note of a few of their memorable answers:

From a playful 70 year-old man, “I made weapons of mass destruction.”  Parenthetically this response came during the half truths about “weapons of mass destruction” formulated and spread by our Nation’s deadly duo, Cheney and Rumsfeld, concerning the nature and the threat of Sadem Hussein’s arsenal.  The patient had worked in Albany, Oregon, at the Wah Chang plant that isolated purified zirconium from beach sand.  Zirconium is used to clad the reactors for our nuclear submarines, indeed a weapon of mass destruction.

A wrinkled eighty-three year-old woman, who had been admitted to the hospital to help with her symptoms of tobacco-related lung disease, was proud that she owned and operated a honky-tonk bar on the outskirts of St Helens, a community that, with tongue in cheek, I refer to as the Appalachia of Oregon.  There on a daily basis she tends the bar. 

An eighty-two year-old Japanese-American woman who remembered that as a teenager she had walked from her family’s village into the rubble of bombed-out Nagasaki two weeks after it had been the target of our second atomic attack.  She apparently had suffered no ill effects.

An eighty-two year-old woman was admitted for acute pyelonephritis and proudly reported that she had smoked marijuana since the mid-1960’s when she had also raised enough for her children.

A frail elderly Jew who had been imprisoned for nine years in a Siberian gulag, ironically he had been arrested almost immediately after the Russians had liberated him from a Nazi concentration camp.

These are stories from the people, the patients, which have strengthened my advocacy for teaching at the bedside.  These stories have allowed the house staff, students and me to recognize additional dimensions of the humanity of those for whom they care.

Gloves---a Touching Story

Gloves---a Touching Story

I have become dedicated to bedside teaching, and by that I mean at the bedside—not outside the patient’s room or at the nursing station or in a room with a white board.  At the bedside, next to patient, hearing the patient’s story and examining him or her often open undiscovered and unexpected insights.

Faith Fitzgerald, professor of medicine at University of California at Davis, wrote of such a bedside experience.  Planning for attending rounds she was told by her house staff that they had “no interesting patients”.  Mildly protesting,  I am sure, the team departed for the bedside breaking through the usual centripetal forces.  They went to the room of an “uninteresting woman” who they discovered was a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic!  The following narrative is not as dramatic but is lovingly instructive.

I am now retired and have the privilege of making teaching rounds each Tuesday morning with an inpatient team:  a teaching hospitalist, a senior resident, a first-year resident, and two medical students.  This Tuesday the group was mobilized reluctantly, as they had “no interesting patients”, and we went to beside of a frail elderly woman recently admitted from a long-term care facility.  She was said to be demented she was immobile, sitting upright in her bed she reeked from the stool in her incontinence pad, her head lolled to the side and her toothless mouth was agape.  Her eyes followed but she did not respond to questions or commands.

We discussed the metabolic derangements and the resulting delirium that had brought her to us.  We examined her head, neck, chest, legs and fingernails.  We discovered nothing unknown.  We returned the bed to a low position and dimmed the overhead lights, and as we moved toward the door, she called us back.  She lifted her head, she opened her eyes, and with her dry tongue spoke “no gloves—no gloves”.  I returned to her side and without gloves I touched her arm, and she said, “No gloves, yes I want to be touched”.

Appropriate touching is important to humans, and even more so for the vulnerable and needy.  It appears that it has become standard to put on thin purple gloves to examine all patients at the bedside.  This seems to have been progressively ongoing for the last thirty years, prompted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and now MRSA and C. difficle.  Before the mid 1980’s we had gloved on occasion for syphilis, viral hepatitis, various skin infections, and of course the rectal exam.  Now clinicians routinely glove with any expectation of touching the patient, including the physical examination.

Human touch is important.  The literature, old and new, medical and non-medical, has encouraged appropriate touching.  As an example, the late Lewis Thomas, widely read essayist, physician and investigator, wrote in 1983 “…the oldest and most effective act of doctors, the touching.  Some people don’t like being handled by others, but not, almost never, sick people.  They need being touched...”.  This is the lesson relearned from this “uninteresting woman”.



2/6/2017