The Chronicles of Valentina - You Can't Make This Stuff Up
The lady is 68, but she looks 80. As an old professor of mine would say, she's already gotten a lot of her living done. She had a(nother) heart attack that resulted in cardiac arrest. The following code was long, but ultimately successful, if you call getting spontaneous heart motion successful. That was ten days ago. She hasn't waked up since. Her brain function is so weak that she doesn't trigger any respirations on her own - the ventilator does all the work. Because of her poor heart function, her kidneys are failing. Her liver wasn’t working so well because of the cirrhosis, and now it doesn’t work at all. Her EEG is awful: severe encephalopathy, otherwise known as there are a few neurons firing, but not in any order. At this point, one can statistically say that if she hasn't waked up, she's not going to. Besides, her heart can barely beat at all. She is slowly dying.
But her son, who has been inebriated whenever anyone has had contact with him, by phone or on the few occasions he's come into the hospital, is convinced she's faking her coma to get out of paying her taxes. Any attempt to tell him otherwise has met with near violence.
Ultimately, what's left of that heart will give out, and no one will be able to restart it. We stood around imagining what kind of reaction Crazy Son will have, and succeeded in scaring ourselves. Call me a coward, but I'm hoping against hope that I will be out of the building when that happens.