What a life...

After being a LTC CNA for only four months, I am officially sickened by people who support this!

We had a new admission Friday evening. I'll call him Herbie. Herbie is confused. He has a foley, colostomy bag, g-tube, and constant o2. He has a PSA because he frequently tries to get out of bed, and he uses his call light to request the bedpan (even though he clearly does not need one).

In report, one the leaving aides told me to take a look at him -- I've never seen so many hookups to one person, having only worked in LTC so far. Our rooms don't usually look like small hospital rooms! This poor man was just lying there, sweating -- the DON and I were actually worried about him. We stripped him of his gown, pulled the blanket down to his knees, pulled his privacy curtain and just had a fan right in front of him. It barely helped.

The DON and I were talking as she helped me repos. him, and I simply said, "I could never live like this, and when I get older, I'm going to make that known to my family." The DON told me that Herbie was a full-code and had all of this because of his daughter. And she told our DON that she was "happy to have him out of the hospital, and excited to have him home one day, on his feet and back to his old life!" I almost choked!

Herbie could barely speak. And when he did, you could barely make out anything he said. In fact, the only things I heard him say were "hi" in response to my introduction, and "no, no" when I replaced his cannula that he took out.

I cannot believe that some people are still full-codes and we're pulling out all these stops to save these 90 or 100 year-old people! When the body starts to break down, in my opinion, you can only go so far before someone just has to rest in peace. How can these little frail old ladies who are just bones still be full-codes? Do you really want us to perform CPR on someone when we know it will just break their bones in half?

All of this just hit me like a train with Herbie. Not to mention he has such terrible circulation problems in his legs, they may as well just not be on his body anymore, and for the better. I just don't understand, are you trying to make someone live forever, or just more comfortably? When it gets down to it, perhaps science could just make us live as long as we'd like, all these things Herbie had are just the start of it -- can't eat, void, defecate, or breathe properly? We have the fix! What's next -- mechanical organs or limbs, artificial fluids or tissues or whatnot for people turning 100something?

I went home and talked to my boyfriend's sister, who works in the same facility, about how disgusted I was with it all. She agreed 100% and told me Herbie had died last night. The worst part -- his daughter thinks it was somehow the facility's fault, as if we made some crucial error. He had labored breathing the only time I spoke to him. We all knew he was on his way, and as soon as he wasn't skilled, they wanted to talk to the daughter about hospice.

I think it's just a shame that he went on to live like this, that he couldn't have gone sooner, perhaps when he could still have memories in his mind, or feel a little more like a human being, and not just a body on auto-pilot.