New Futility Cases

There are several colorful, unreported, anecdotal futility cases described and discussed on the March 3rd post at Pandabearmd. For example (from the post and the comments):

• I know real futile care when I see it. The patients I often describe, the ones who are older than dirt, not nearly as responsive, and collections of every major pathology you can imagine but who yet manage to cling to some strict constructionist version of life are distressingly common, so common that I probably see and admit at least one or two of them a week to the ICU. (This is not even considering the patients that are post-arrest or on the losing side of a major cerebral vascular accident accident and who are, in fact, dead except for the polite fiction of ongoing organ perfusion.)
• Earlier this week, a mother brought her two-month-old to the hospital for yet another admission. The child has a rare condition where his skin readily detaches from his body and exposes his inner workings. The child has had multiple encounters with sepsis and has undergone respiratory arrest on more than a few occasions. Each time, physicians gently prod the parents to consider end-of-life care, noting that this baby will likely not live long—and the life that does exist will be quite painful. The reply is always the same: “Do EVERYTHING to keep my child alive.”
• Basically he had an MI and was anoxic for 90 minutes until he was brought to the hospital. In Mexico (note he was a Mexican national) they told them, he is brain dead, let him go. The family disagreed, took the patient out of the hospital and drove him to the US border and dropped him out the back of the truck. Then demanded that he be admitted to a US hospital where they continued to demand everything in a futile fashion. Three weeks later they accepted that he was not coming back and decided to withdraw. But now, it had been two days, he hadn’t died, they wanted to go back the other way.