We only ever hear of medical miracles- the time a child drowned for hours was somehow revived, the time a man had massive pulmonary embolisms that blocked off both sides of her lungs but yet survived and thrived, the time a man was revived despite his heart having stopped for a whole hour, all the "almost-died but didn't", the "lucky to be alive" stories that populate pretty much every form of modern communication known.
Death is supposed to be determined by the lack of a pulse, but somehow that didn't stop these people from not dying.
When are you supposed to stop trying to for a medical miracle and when are you supposed to keep trying? And how do you know the outcome will always be the positive one that they show you on TV? What if you do all this work, revive a once-dead person only to have a damaged person on your hands?
I wonder if I gave up too soon on my parents.
Logically, I think I took the right steps: assume we had succeeded in reviving my father.... then what? He still had the cancer, the inability to breathe by himself, the mouth ulcers that made it difficult for him to swallow and so on. Or if we had revived my mother and then she ended up like a vegetable, bedridden for life, dependent on someone else for every single action. Neither of them would have wanted that, I think.
Yet, the part of me that weaves fantasies wonders if I should have fought harder for a medical miracle.
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