One participant said that recently, when her father was in the hospital and the treating doctor wanted her to sign a DNAR, she refused because she was waiting for her mother to arrive. She knew that her father had expressed clear wishes to her mother to continue to live as long as possible. Her father had already recently faced death more than once and survived. Peter said that although his mother was a nurse, she would never discuss these issues with him. Peter entered the difficult territory of pain management.
Pain puts stress on the cardiac and respiratory systems.
Peter says that a person builds up a tolerance for a drug like morphine. A single lethal dose to a healthy person is just that - it will kill them. However, a person in pain can build up a tolerance past the dose that would kill a healthy person. A participant told us how hard it was for her to get morphine for her mother who was painfully dying of cancer. She ended up going to another doctor, much to the chagrin of the first.