Death Bed Scenes

“If your heart stops, do you want to be resuscitated, and if you can’t breathe on your own, do you want to be intubated (a procedure in which a tube is inserted down your throat and a machine takes over your breathing)?”  Those weren’t their exact words but that was the meaning of the questions that two young doctors were asking me in the early hours of the morning towards the end of my first week at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  I tried to explain that I didn’t want aggressive measures if they brought me only a little more time at the expense of a severe reduction in my quality of life.  

I didn’t understand why they were asking me those questions but later I learned that the oxygen level in my blood had dropped to a dangerously low level and that my life was in danger.  The doctors bid me good night and I was left with my own thoughts.  It suddenly struck me that the two doctors would not have come to me late at night if death were not an immediate possibility.  I ought to be reviewing my life, I thought, taking note of my successes and failures, my hopes for my children and grandchildren, giving thanks for what had been a good life.  But no, I thought, I’m not up to it.  All I wanted was to luxuriate in the warmth of my bed and in the freedom from pain which my medicines had brought me.  “Is this,” I wondered, “what it’s like to die?  If so, it’s not so bad.” 

I shouldn’t have done it but, feeling that the end might be near, I called my wife at three or four in the morning.  I don’t remember what I told her but she came to the hospital as soon as she could.  “I’m letting go,” I told her when she arrived.  “It’s all right,” she said, “you’ve had a good life and it’s okay to let go now.” 

I fell asleep and when I awoke I felt a lot better.  The drop in my oxygen level, however, set in motion an effort to find the source of the problem.  A CT with contrast revealed a tumor, surrounded by clots, that was traveling in a pulmonary vein into my heart.  My wife and daughter called our immediate relatives, including our son in California, who dropped what they were doing and came to see me.  This gave me an opportunity to tell each of them that I loved them and in one case to ask for forgiveness.  I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to do so.  But I also felt a bit like a fraud, for by this time I was feeling pretty good.  “From now on,” I told them,  “you’re excused from further death bed scenes with me.”