dialysis

what the family wants

It was December. Mr. S was well into his 80s and had been trying to die all year. A clot in the lung here. A stop of the heart there. But his best effort to date began simply enough with a trip to the bathroom to brush his teeth. A loud thud brought his wife in to find him lying in the bathroom floor.

make it stop

The distress call came to me fourth-hand in the form of an email. The colleague of a colleague’s wife’s father wondered if I could help because the father was contemplating stopping the peritoneal dialysis his wife had been helping him do at home for the last several years.