Karma: a poll

[Heddi]

14. How fucking callous of you. You have the bedside manner of a ghoul

"Some were surrounded with love and comfort, some were not.

Not always, but sometimes that is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people"

Did you spend much time in a trauma ward? PACU? ER? ICU? MICU? NICU? any of those?

There were plenty of people who were, I'm sure, quite loved and would have given anything for comfort, but were instead crushed to death in their car. Or by someone else's car. Or who died in the OR. Or whose prolonged, protracted, painful death due to massive burns just happened at the wrong time when the family finally gave themselves 15 minutes for a shower and coffee.

For seeing people through their last days, you have an incredibly selfish and short-sighted view of the pain and turmoil that death and dying does to patients and their family members.

You know what---I've been around the last moments of people's lives too. Spending many years on a heart/lung/kidney floor ensured that I was more likely than not the last person the patient saw as they passed from this mortal plane to another. Rather than take that moment where they are scared, alone, where their death was unexpected and their sickness quick, when their family lived hundreds or thousands of miles away to think "gee, they're dying alone so this is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people," I realized that these people were at the most vulnerable point in their live since the moment of their birth.

I treated them with compassion, understanding how fucking hard it is for a child in the military serving an unending and unjust war in Iraq to make it back in time to be at the bedside of a dying parent. Hey, that parent must've been a shit or the kid would be there, right? Time zones and war-zones be damned.

Or shit...too bad 8 members of a family died in a multi-car accident, and the one dying in front of me is alone. Must've been a real bastard or else they'd be surrounded with love and comfort, instead of the slow suffocation that comes from drowning in your own blood filling your lungs from your crushed chest.

Real compassionate there, cbayer. Between blaming people for their own misery ("if you treat others poorly, you will receive bad in return&quot to this fucking turd nugget "Some were surrounded with love and comfort, some were not. Not always, but sometimes that is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people," I really hope for the sake of humanity that you do what you can to stay away from the sick and dying. They've got too much going on to deal with your self-righteous judgements at the moment of their death. Please tell me you are not a health-care worker....