A Crime of Compassion.ppt

Target learners: second year students of English Text: A Crime of Compassion by Barbara Huttmann Teaching focus: Reading critically Essential English Six months later… liquid food we poured down a tube, solutions we dripped into his veins, oxygen we piped to a mask on his face. “Mercy… for God’s sake, please just let me go.” A 60-pound skeleton kept alive by… Group discussion What would you do if you were his wife? What would you do if you were his doctor? What would you do if you were his nurse? “I refused to resuscitate him again. I simply sat there and held his hand while he died.” It was the Phil Donahue show where the guest is a fatted calf and the audience a 200-strong flock of vultures hungering to pick at the bones. A Crime of Compassion Barbara Huttman “Murderer,” a man shouted. “God help patients who get you for a nurse.” “What gives you the right to play God? ” another one asked. A Crime of Compassion Euthanasia Mercy killing Do doctors and nurses have the right to kill a patient in order to end his suffering? Yes! A Crime of Compassion Barbara The first time he stopped breathing, the nurse pushed the button that calls a “code blue” throughout the hospital and sends a team rushing to resuscitate the patient. Each time he stopped breathing, sometimes two or three times a day in one day, the code team came. Yes, We battled the disease…. Doctors and technicians worked their miracles and walked away. The nurses stayed to wipe the saliva that drooled from his mouth, irrigate the big craters of bedsores that covered his hips, suction the lung fluids that threatened to drown him, clean the feces that burn his skin like lye, pour the liquid food down that tube attached his stomach, put pillows between his knees to ease the bone-on-bone pain, turn him every hour to keep the bedsores from getting worse, and change his gown and linen every two hours to keep him from being soaked in perspiration. Yes, We battled the disease…. Yes!