[Sarracenia]

My instructor told me a very interesting story. Forgive me if I am sketchy on some important details.

There was a woman on her unit who was brain dead (two doctors have said so) but still had some of her stem intact and functioning. She still had a pulse and breathed with the aid of a ventilator. However, most of her body was rotting away. So, as hard as it is for me to believe, she was in a limbo of life and death with very little hope for the former. She was a living, breathing corpse with a pulse.

And, according to my instructor, she smelled like it. She said that her room stank and that parts of the unit began to smell too. It was very traumatizing to see much less to deal with as a nurse.

Believe it or not, this woman is a full code. Her family believed in prayer healing and was extremely vocal and insistent on keeping her alive as long as possible. The doctors were afraid to go against their wishes even though they have full rights to turn off life support systems due to the fact that the woman is brain dead.

The nurses, including my instructor, when to the bioethics committee. The lawyers were not convinced and said that the nurses had no grounds for insisting that the woman's life support systems should be shut down. They claimed that the nurses were just "uncomfortable" about it.

So my instructor took the lawyers for a field trip to her unit. The smell hit them... and they were convinced.

It still strikes me as unbelievable...