This is a book that explores the area of what a person does if a patient is unlikely to recover. Do we keep the life-sustaining machines on? Do we follow the patient's written will, if any, do we follow the legal next-of-kin's desire or take into consideration a minor, but a family member who probably knows the patient more in the immediate years prior to the accident that led to the medical dilemma?
Personally, my father-in-law was in a public hospital brain dead after a major operation. His children and his wife all agreed to switching off the machine. By the time his son who lived on the other side of the globe arrived, the deceased was being placed in a body bag to be removed to the mortuary. When I brought my children to see him for the last time in the ICU, he was breathing and warm to our touch. Although he was in a coma, he looked like he was asleep.
Another person I knew also went into a coma, I think it was after a major stroke. His family kept him alive for weeks on the machine. It must have cost a bomb. It usually costs about one thousand dollars per day in the ICU in a private hospital in this country. Lots of folks went to pray for the patient's miraculous recovery. Finally, after more than a year in a nursing home with around-the-clock nursing care and a host of machine assistance, he stopped breathing without ever regaining consciousness.
The overt reaction to the above two cases is : my sister-in-law and her husband both signed documents called the living wills. Such document gives the children or next-of-kin legal right to switch off machines so that the estate of the persons in coma would not be depleted by enormous hospital bills.
For me personally, I need not write such a will, I have zero medical insurance. If and when I were to go into an ICU, it would be in a government hospital. Since life sustaining machines are severely limited in numbers in any government hospital, what happened in case number two would technically be an improbable scenario.
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