Miss Ellie’s Story

Excerpt

I had walked into a hornet’s nest. It was my first day attending on the inpatient general medicine wards of our inner-city county teaching hospital. Miss Ellie was my only ICU patient. She was 87 years old, an African-American woman who had sustained an acute intracranial hemorrhage that had rendered her irrevocably comatose. The hospital’s standard Brain Death Protocol had been applied, and she had shown no responses to any stimuli. Miss Ellie was brain dead, but the ventilator and artificial nutrition and hydration were keeping her alive. Her body was strong, so this could go on for some time. …