Sedated by Oxycodone, Ted slept despite the rhythmic ruckus of his breathing machine. He never felt quite rested in the hospital. While awake, his gaze often lingered on a snapshot that captured him in the past: full of laughter and radiant joy with his little granddaughter, Tara. The grandfather in the photo — muscular, mischievous — barely resembled the emaciated elder in the bed who silently mouthed short answers to my questions.
Ted had come to the hospital for cancer chemotherapy, but, within a few weeks, he became inseparable from his ventilator. Soon, he began needing dialysis as well. By the time I met him, he had been on a ventilator in the ICU for eleven months. Multiple attempts to get him off the breathing machine had been foiled by pneumonias and assorted organ dysfunctions. For patients like Ted, who have worsening multi-organ failure, mechanical ventilation serves to keep them alive, but is powerless to return them to their former healthy selves. Additional therapies such as tube feeds, dialysis, and antibiotics also help prolong the dying process from hours to months or even years.
Ted endured breathing tubes, feeding tubes, injections, pain, thirst, nausea, and recurrent infections. He did this in hopes of a miracle that could end his dependence on machines and custodial caretakers, in hopes that he could go home, in hopes that he could play with Tara once again. His hopes rose and fell with the daily fluctuations in his clinical status. To me, he was the embodiment of Nietzsche’s words: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
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