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Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Case Study

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Imagine a patient ask you to end his life. The patient has the right to do so because of the Do-not-resuscitate order. This order prevents health care providers to not do cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) if the patient is near the end of his life. I will be horrified and distressed under this situation. In my understanding, a nurse acts as a sentry who watches over and protects the patient. Yet, the patient told me to kill him and abandon all my moral values. This is an extremely difficult decision to make because as much as I don’t want the patient to suffer from pain, I also don’t want to take away his precious life. However, is a third option available? A study was done to illuminate nurses’ experiences of being in ethically difficult situations in an emergency ward. “The child was pronounced dead with no effort made to do anything…I only felt that this was a terrible situation to be in…”(Langeland et al). The nurse in this situation felt vulnerable because there was nothing she could have done to save the child. Just like the previous scenario, as much as you want to save the patient, there was no other way but to respect the patient’s decision for death. …show more content…
However, not all patients are able to recover with medical assistance. The biggest challenge is to be in situations which involve seriously ill or dead because these memories can be stuck within you for a long time. When you spend a great amount of time caring for someone, you start to build a close relationship with that person. Therefore, after witnessing death, it becomes unmanageable to control the feelings. You would like to stay professional but you can’t help the tears that fall on their own. These traumatic events often affect nurses and other medical professionals

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