Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Barney Google

Since Google took over the world and changed everyone's life (mind you, I am writing this using Google's Blogger, hoping that Google will index my pages one of these days), there has been a lot of talk about the meaning of the word "Google." But very few people seem to mention Barney Google, the comic strip hero from the first half of the 20th century.

http://www.szepseg.com/2007/05/barney-google.html

Before I became a nurse I taught English at Tufts University. I always had my students read a short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a story about a beautiful city called Omelas, filled with happy, prosperous people and their children, whose lives are untroubled by sadness or pain.

But there’s an ugly secret. For Omelas to prosper, one child must live in a small, dank, windowless basement room, undernourished, fetid and neglected. It’s a killer story, and I had my students read it so we could discuss how a society’s achievements sometimes can’t be separated from the misery of others

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/0 ... d-of-life/

Taking care of this patient also made some of the nurses on the floor yearn for a more humane job. As one put it, “This is torture.”

Many of us found it hard to come to work. The young man wasn’t my patient, but we all knew him and his parents by sight, and knew their story. As time passed I began to feel deeply ashamed of what we were doing to him. The professional label for the feelings we nurses had is “moral distress,” the anxiety, fatigue and hopelessness that providers experience in the face of medically futile care. (The pervasiveness of moral distress among medical workers was the subject of a recent Doctor and Patient column by Dr. Pauline W. Chen.)

The aggressive treatment reminded me of Omelas. In this case, the shining city was the edifice of modern cancer treatments and modern medicine in general.

Medicine today achieves great things, but too often when patients have no hope of surviving we use technology and drugs simply to keep people alive. Those racked bodies give us the peace of mind that when our time comes “everything will be done,” and we will get our own chance at a miracle. This patient’s suffering was one way, for the doctors at least, to keep the dream alive.

He was charming, friendly, good-looking; everyone wanted him to get better, to live. But believing that we could save him did not make saving him possible

Ms. Le Guin’s short story ends by explaining that a few residents of Omelas become so distressed to learn of the suffering child that they decide to leave the shining city, never to return.

It’s estimated that as many as 15 to 25 percent of nurses quit their jobs as a result of moral distress, also never to return. We do such good work here, and in truth I mostly love my job. I don’t want to be among the ones who walk away from Omelas.