Flogging a dead horse

Heart failure. For the laymen amongst you, when the heart gets weak (usually after a heart attack, or just old age). Too weak to pump adequate blood to vital organs, like the brain and kidneys. Initially you can try medications to off load the heart of strain. Things like diuretics and sometimes beta blockers to help slow the heart down. But the heart is just like any muscle. My muscles ache after I run up to the 10th floor for a cardiac arrest. So too does the heart get tired after many years of strain.

Eventually, no matter how many medications they try you are past the point of no return.

So it is with our man on one of the wards. We could call the ward "Sunrise". Many wards have silly names designed to lift the spirits slightly and help diminish the overwhelming stench of urine as you approach. Most nurses are well meaning and would clean up said urine, were it not for their constant need to fill out "care bundles" and other meaningless forms that serve not to care, but to audit.

Our man is past the point of no return. The 8 different medicines are serving only to perpetuate his renal failure. He is drowsy. His wife, herself in her late eighties, asks for him "to be kept comfortable". She doesn't want him to suffer. I agree.

But his team of highly trained professionals are still pushing him full of diuretics, carefully timed iv fluids and performing daily blood tests.

They should let him go in peace. It's what his wife wants.