Stripped Away

I’ve come to understand we have a cultural view of death as the worst-case scenario. Anyone dealing directly with death and dying knows this isn’t true. But looking at how our systems are set up, it is clear we’ve concluded that avoiding death outweighs the cost of maintaining life. 

I had a discussion with my family about this, and we exchanged end-of-life wishes. One family member wholeheartedly embraced this outlook, clarifying that they would like to be kept alive in any way possible. I wouldn’t have known. I’m glad we discussed it. 

I feel near the opposite. 

Last night, we declared a man dead. He had a Do-Not-Resuscitate order, which, come to think of it, someone from the state must have signed. He had been living in a nursing home, unable to move or speak.

Before the nursing home, he was homeless and without family. He was found nearly dead, rushed to the ER, and they were able to keep him alive, but he was never oriented to who he was, or able to move after that. 

Some version of this is a common backstory for those living in skilled nursing facilities. They have no voice, no support system, no advocates. The state pays the bills and the nursing home makes the money. A miserable place to live and work, but a great investment for someone with money who wants to be hands-off. 

We run calls on these bodies and see the worst of the miserable state so many live in. And that is what it feels like, running calls on bodies, not people. For many of them, their humanity was clearly stripped away a long time ago. 

When I first started on the ambulance, I transferred a woman who had both legs amputated after pressure wounds got infected. First one, then the other. She had pressure sores on her elbows and her family was concerned. I’d be concerned too, but maybe not for the same reasons. 

In nursing school, I bonded with one of the clinical instructors who was also an ICU nurse. She had just moved to the area after working for years in an ICU in a big city that was recognized for how long they were able to keep people alive. The problem, she explained to me, was that they did this by introducing more and more vasopressors so that the circulating blood the person had would shunt to their vital organs, often at the expense of their extremities. So arms and legs would not receive blood flow, and fingers and toes would start to turn black, moving up the arm or leg till it was cut off. One limb at a time would go until what was left was a head and core. These are critically sick patients. They aren’t awake talking, they’re disoriented or unconscious, bodies fighting to stay alive, medical system fighting with them. Eventually, they would die, with none she’d seen be discharged from the hospital, but they all got accolades for keeping someone so sick alive for so long. 

At the same time, our culture has a hero thing going on with the cowboy who is steadfast enough to shoot the deer who was hit by the car in the head. I’m not suggesting we do this with each other, I’m just acknowledging the disconnect.

If we want to honor our humanity and our souls, why do we keep trapping them in bodies?

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Review

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This story is profound, provocative, and ethically charged. It moves from personal reflection into cultural and systemic critique with impressive clarity and moral courage. It speaks truth to a culture that often refuses to look directly at suffering unless it’s heroic or redemptive. But here, the narrator asks us to look at suffering that is silent, prolonged, and systemically sustained—and to ask ourselves why we allow it.

The tone is unflinching, somber, and ethically reflective. The narrator writes with a mature, morally grounded voice—compassionate but unsparing. There’s a deep grief beneath the clarity, but no despair. Instead, it offers thoughtful critique anchored in lived experience, which elevates the piece from opinion to witness. There is a philosophical weight —it confronts the unspoken contradiction at the heart of modern healthcare: Is survival the goal, or is life with dignity?

This piece delivers trenchant and necessary social commentary on multiple levels. It speaks to the institutional abandonment of patients with no families, no voices, and no choices, becoming passive occupants of systems profiting from their slow deterioration. It exposes how hospitals and long-term care facilities are rewarded for prolonging life, even when it comes at the cost of human dignity. It highlights the problematic ethics of critical care – the ICU nurse’s vasopressor story gives readers a haunting look at what “saving lives” can mean in practice: incremental dismemberment in the name of care. It points out cultural hypocrisy – the cowboy/shoot-the-deer metaphor is piercing. We show mercy to animals in pain, but refuse it to humans—perhaps because one allows us to feel heroic, and the other demands humility. These insights are delivered with clarity and emotional precision. There is no argument for euthanasia or withdrawal of care in every case—it is an exposure of the disconnect between our stated values and our practiced ones.

This piece is not a call to arms, but a call to conscience.