"Holly Lisle - Sympathy for the Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

seventy-eight years old, had fallen down her stairs at home and
fractured her skull. By the time her daughter had found her and
gotten an ambulance, the old woman’s brain had undergone
irreversible damage caused by the swelling.
Her doctor was a huge believer in heroic measures, however.
The old woman, at death’s door, was given infusions to reduce the
swelling inside her head, other infusions to regulate her erratic
heart, further infusions to control her blood pressure—and then
she’d been shipped upstairs to the ICU and Dayne.
And there she’d languished for over a week. When her breathing
stopped, Dr. Batskold put her on a ventilator. When her kidneys
failed, he had the portable dialysis unit brought in and he’d flushed
her blood through a machine.
She was in a coma. She was never going to see anyone again,
she was never going to sit up again or laugh again or even breathe
on her own again. She was never going to be a human being again,
and yet the ICU nurses had orders to treat her as a full code—to
take every possible measure to keep her alive, no matter what that
measure was.
Dayne had protested this to Dr. Batskold after the first dialysis.
“We’re here to save them, Dayne,” he’d said. It was his perpetual
response to Dayne’s protests against what she saw as his
excessive heroics. He shook his head and looked over at
her—gave her his famous, kindly, grandfatherly smile. “I don’t play
to lose, Dayne.”
“It’s my job as this patient’s advocate to suggest that what we are
doing to her isn’t in her best interests,” Dayne told him.
Batskold raised an eyebrow. “Did you get a promotion? I didn’t
hear.”
“Promotion?”
“Promotion . . . to patient advocate. How exciting for you.” He’d
looked down at Mrs. Paulley’s chart. “I must see a copy of your new
job description.”
“Every nurse is a patient advocate,” Dayne had told him.
He’d finished his orders and slammed the cover shut on the chart.
“Then why doesn’t every nurse give me the kind of trouble you give
me, Dayne? No. You’re out of line here—overstepping your bounds.
It’s my job to decide when we keep on trying. It’s your job to keep
on trying. When God is ready for Mrs. Paulley, He’ll take her.”
Dayne would have mentioned that God had been trying to take
Mrs. Paulley for over a week, but it wouldn’t have done any good.
Batskold’s response to that was invariably, “He isn’t trying hard
enough then, is he?”
The conversation, days later, still ran through her head. She kept
writing, angry. Sooner or later someone would review one of
Batskold’s charts and question his treatment of people who had no
hope. They would look at the costs he was running up for families
who would never be able to pay off the hundreds of thousands of
dollars their bill would run; they’d look at the pain he was causing to
those same people, by letting them hope for miracles that weren’t