Mercy Killing

There was this 19 year old mom who took her 5 month old baby girl to her friend's house.  She left her on the futon in the living room and got high in the next room with her friends.  When she came back, the little girl had rolled over onto a blanket and not been able to breath, she found her blue and not breathing.  She was brought by ambulance to my hospital where she was resuscitated for about 45 minutes.  We know as doctors that past 5 minutes of resuscitation there is little hope.  By the time she was stable, we had machines breathing for her, chemicals keeping her heart going, and a cap monitoring her brain function.  She showed none.  She laid in her little crib, looking like a perfectly normal 5 month old girl, cute even, with tubes in almost every orifice, but otherwise she could have been sleeping.

When my attending and I arrived to the scene, the room was filled with family, it seemed like 15 people packed into a tiny room.  The mother was in tears sitting on a chair near her daughters bed, people surrounding her, arms of comfort on her shoulder. Before going in I had offered to my attending, "I don't want to tell her this, but I'll do the talking if you want me to."  I knew what needed said, I knew likely no one had told her this whole time.  He looked surprised, "I'll do it." he said simply.

He and I walked in and knelt next to the mother, introducing ourselves, he asked what she had been told about her daughters condition.  In a quivering voice, "They told me that if she lived she would need a tube in her stomach to eat...bring my daughter back to me!" she finished in a sobbing wail.  In that moment, I saw the opening and knew he would take it.  Her soul and all the hope she had left in her body were sitting in front of us, completely vulnerable.  It was as if she were staring down at a blade he held in his hand, knowing where it would go.  Deep down she knew before we walked in that it would be there, waiting for her.  In that moment his words swiftly buried it deeply in her heart, her hope shattered, her soul destroyed, her daughter in her eyes truly was dead.  A mercy killing.

When a child dies on the unit, you would think it's something out of a movie. People shouting, running, crowds flocking.  More often than not, it's very intimate, very quiet. You walk passed the room the next day and someone else is laying in that bed, as if that little girl, Brianna, had never been there...maybe it was just a bad dream?   No one says much about it, we all try to forget and move on, there is more than enough to do, so we throw ourselves into it and, hopefully, we forget.

Newbie Doc