The Other Side of the Fence: A Nurse's Testimony

As a health-care professional, I encountered patients daily in the intensive care unit - "circling the drain" - as we described their status. They were dying. They required nonstop, twenty-four-hour care to keep them alive. Most were sedated on life-sustaining drugs and ventilator-assist devices. I look back on my own near-death encounter not as a nurse taking care of a dying patient but as that patient clinging to life.