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When they won’t get better

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Daniel J. Lamas, M.D., looks  at what to do when when a chronically critically  ill patient  probably won’t ever get better.

Among his remarks:

“Chronic critical illness is not something I learned about in medical school, or something that many doctors even talk about. One reason might be that the care for the chronically critically ill quite literally takes these patients out of our view – they move, as my patient did, from hospital to long-term care and back again, accompanied by a growing stack of medical records as things slowly fall apart.

“In the early moments of critical illness, the choices seem relatively simple, the stakes high – you live or you die. But the chronically critically ill inhabit a kind of in-between purgatory state, all uncertainty and lingering. How do we explain this to families just as they breathe a sigh of relief that their loved one hasn’t died? Should we use the words “chronic critical illness”? Would it change any decisions if we were to do so? Here, I find that I am often at a loss.”

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