DNR

The other night I had this patient. Such a nice guy. In his 60’s. Has cancer. He was supposed to get chemotherapy that day, but his blood count was too low, so I ended up having to give him a couple units of blood, so we could get his counts up in order to tolerate the chemo.

As I checked his chart I noticed his wishes to be DNR(do no resuscitate). For some reason it really caught me off guard. I kept thinking, he’s so young, he still has grandkids to watch, a wife to love. Don’t give up. Fight.

It seems like cancer always hits the people who will handle it best. It doesn’t seem fair. Not that anyone deserves to get cancer, but it just sucks when it’s the kind of people that still have so much living left to do. I learned that night, it’s not my place to judge whether he should be DNR or not. It’s not my life. I don’t know him that well. His options as far as treatment are pretty slim, so the more I think about it, I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be kept alive by a machine or put my family through that.

It’s for reasons like this that I believe what I believe. If I didn’t I’d be lost. Faith sometimes is like throwing it all up in the air and letting it be caught. Knowing it will be caught. In the end, faith is what we got, so keep believing and hang on.

On another note, I had this 5 yr old patient that night too. He had just come up from surgery, broken leg, and his parents weren’t there yet. So I sat in his room with him. We found some cartoons and chatted about Sponge-Bob Square Pants. This kid was a sugar-pie. His eyelashes were so long. And he admitted right off the bat that he still wets the bed sometimes. He almost lost it when we couldn’t find the Spider-Man sticker they gave him before surgery. So I went and found another one, and maybe a couple extra, I’m such a sucker.