Death

Read this. Thanks Richard. Theresa Brown: At my job, people die.

That's hardly our intention, but they die nonetheless.

Usually it's at the end of a long struggle — we have done everything modern medicine can do and then some, but we can't save them. Some part of their body, usually their lungs or their heart or their liver, has become too frail to function. These are the "good deaths," the ones where the family is present and knows what to expect. Like all deaths, these deaths are difficult, but they are controlled, unsurprising, anticipated.

And then there are the other deaths: quick and rare, where life leaves a body in minutes. In my hospital these deaths are "Condition A's." The "A" stands for arrest, as in cardiac arrest, as in this patient's heart has all of a sudden stopped beating and we need to try to restart it.