Neuro ICU - Do you talk to brain-dead patients?

If this is in response to the post above, I imagine it's because allowing a grieving mother to think for the rest of her life that, if only she'd pushed harder, her son might still be alive seems more important than vacating the ICU bed as soon as possible.

I once withheld morphine from a woman in great distress, minutes before death, even though I strongly believed it would make her last moments more comfortable, because her son was in such concrete denial about her dying. I was certain that if I gace the morphine he would forever believe that, if only he'd been more forceful about stopping me, his mother would have survived.

I once looked after a young Indian guy who'd drowned at a local pool. He had an unknown down time and massive hypoxic brain damage - GCS of 3 and a rapidly increasing core temp (by the end, when he was 42oC/107.6F, you could feel it when you entered his room). His family said they understood he was, to all intents and purposes, already dead and that there was no hope. But several years earlier he'd had a very vivid dream that he's drwoned, the doctors said he'd die, and six days later he woke up. He made his family promise that, if he ever did drown, they would do everything to keep him alive until the sixth day. Even though they knew if was futile (one brother was a neurologist, another a neurosurgeon) they asked if we could do everything possible to extend his life until that sixxth day. We did, he didn't wake up, and we pulled out.

Maybe the mother in sarahrain's story needs that much time to come to terms with what is undoubtedly a shocking loss. Maybe this is a form of bargaining, and when Monday comes she picks a new deadline - in which case withdrawal anyway is reasonable. But when the media's full of stories about people being told their loved ones will die, are already really dead, and the patient survived, it's not too hard to understand why some people are reluctant to accept this as fact.