Party Food And Euthanasia

One of the day shift nurses celebrated her birthday today. We got the left-overs. There was the usual party food, pizza, tortilla chips, dip, cake and boiled rice. Because of a lack of counter space, we were using the trash can as a table. That's where the cake and pizza were. For some reason, housekeeping thought that because the food was on a trash can, it was trash. They not only threw it out, they took the trash bag so we couldn't even dig it out and retrieve it. Thank God the plain, boiled rice was okay.

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We had a terminally ill patient who we were struggling to keep comfortable without killing him with the morphine. It's not an easy balance to strike. Night shift gave him a little too much morphine and his respirations went down to 4 per minute. He was given narcan, which is the antidote to morphine, and he recovered enough to continue the dying process.

His wife was angry. She didn't mind that we overdosed him, she was upset that we reversed it. She said the next time we overdose him, to let him die. Fortunately, she took him home before we got to overdose him again, but it does present an interesting issue. He was a DNR, meaning, do not resuscitate, but does that mean we shouldn't correct our mistakes? If we make a mistake and just watch a patient die, that sounds like euthanasia.

On the other hand, I do see her point. We're not letting him die. Now that she is in charge of his meds, I'll be surprised if he survives the night.