By Maggie McGuire, R.N.
These days I am uneasy in my role as a professional nurse. While it has never been easy, the past held no questions about the ultimate goal in patient care – save lives and restore people to health. But things have changed. The familiar is becoming unfamiliar. The new goal is illusive.Looking into my patient's eyes, I often see a kind of fear. What questions are behind the searching eyes that maae me want to reach out and gather them into my arms, sheltering them from the uI'known? CIrist, working through me, has alerted me to a vigilance I have never sensed in my work before.I have begun to understand why the phrase quality of life nags away at my mind, raising havoc with a Judeo-Christian value system that has always been the foundation upon which I base my ethical treatment of patients. I see codes stopped abrupily and treatments heing withheld when someone judges that the quality of life may be under par on humanity's scale.In contrast, my faith tells me that on God's scale, every human being is "wonderfully and feclaully made", thereby allowing for no quality points to be ascribed for such things as ambulation skills, hearing and eyesight abilities, keenness of mind, acuity of reasoning. Clinging to the sanctity of life mind-set enables us to love each patient in the status that he or she occupies, wheteer bedfast, crippled, immobilized by contractures, blind, deaf, incapacitated by MVA trauma or stroke, old or young, pre-born or mid-life. As God's people and as His appointed care-givers, we are able to love human beings whether they are soaked in urine, bleeding from devastating wounds, reekingofpurulentdrainage, or violently abusive and flailing outatall attempts to help them.It would seemthat the secular world seeks to mislead patients into thiniting that their quality of life is a variable that can bejudged by another person, using factors of age, disability, and helplessness as criteria for making that judgement. Clinging to the sanctity of life mind-set allows us to know and grrciously to believe that all human beings are God's creation, that life is His gift from the moment of conception when He gives it, until theday we ditto this life andjoyously enter' into that new life with Him. Only when human life is deemed sacred, His gift to be cherished and protected; only when we believe that we are created in His image and uniquely gifted according to Ilis plan for us, is the care-giver role tolerable.Because He first loved us, we are able to love those hurting, deformed, bleeding, infectious human beings inourcharge. When we forsake the Judeo-Christian value system that assigns the same quality for everyone and instead begin to look at quality from he humanistic standpoint that places people on a scale of one to ten aoeording to their capability and longevity, I don't think anyone will survive. The medical arena will become a "survival of the fittesC' environment that offers, as its ultnnate escape, death. Surely, we in the medical field have more to offer our patients than this hopeless lack of creativity.There can be no more clear instruction for us in the medical field than Deuteronomy 30:19, where we are admonished to "choose life". Only by keeping God's naandate for "choosing life" wilt we, as nurscs, be able to decipher clarity in the confusion of colliding values systems. We must fervently pray for His wisdom to guide every decision.A head-on collision is inevitable between the old ethic (Christianity) and the new ethic (humanism). There is not room for both. One cannot partiatly abort a pre-born child, just as one cannot partially kill an elderly patient. Either we work to protect and preserve life, or we walk away and let Satan blind our eyes and desensitize peoples' rninds with his ultimate offer of death as the cherished gift of the new ethic, thus dethroning God in the rninds of society.The nurse who says, "I don't think we should be doing all that lab work on the patient in room 212" (an 82 yearold patient with multiple health problerns) is falling directly into Satan's trap. The master deceiver gleefully hardens the hearts of many care-givers in the medical field. How else would it be possible that, in one part of the hospital, pre-born babies are mercilessly killed for the sake of someone's convenience while, in another Parr of the same hospital, premature babies are being saved in critical care units?
Today we make our grand rounds, ascribing label "code" or "no code", life or death. Tomorrow will we be asked to make those same rounds, following orders to kill patients by injecting lethal medications? And someday, when we become the patients, will our eyes gaze into those of our care-givers in confidence....or in fear?
Maggie McGuire is president of Atlantic Lutherans for Life in Iowa This article is reprinted from Living A Family Life Companion, winter 1991.