This past Tuesday marked the season finale of Glee. A limit experience grieved by many in their Facebook updates, including myself. 

The show features a great deal more singing and dancing than this blog does, even though it dramatizes topics that are often blogged about here: an adult going through a divorce who is a teacher of high school students, a high school student being raised by two dads, one of whom was the sperm donor that helped create her, that same high school student finding and reuniting with her surrogate mother, that surrogate mom adopting a baby of a teenage mother, that teenage mother reuniting with her mom who initially disowned her but who is now divorcing her dad, another dad wrestling with connecting to his homosexual son, that homosexual son grieving the death of his mother and trying to connect to the mother of another choir member who is dating his dad, and that other choir member is still grieving the death of his dad…oh brother!  

The show is refreshing despite its forced drama because the characters unite and transcend depression through the power of music and dancing that works in the moment, yet never erases the reality to which they return.  Divorce is still divorce, death is still death, grief is still grief, thus limit experiences are still limiting.

In real life, we struggle a great deal more with limit experiences. Yesterday, we admitted a patient into our hospice program whose body is equipped with a machine that is outside of his body, that can be plugged into the wall outlet or a battery, and that causes his heart to beat.  No one on our team had ever seen or worked with this type of machine except one…and her only exposure to it was from watching Grey’s Anatomy!  What type of universe do I live in when a legitimate care planning question our team asks is, “What would McDreamy do?”

I am humbled to see that we live in a universe where our medical capabilities far outstrip the physical capabilities of our bodies.  The patient with this fantastical machine is still dying and admitted to hospice. The biggest dilemma facing this patient’s loved ones is: “When do WE unplug the machine?” And the WE who will be deciding are, based on the mass resonance of a show like Glee and the mélange of family systems presented there, a cacophony of relationships that are ill-equipped to make such a heavy decision.  We can pray that advanced directives have been made and communicated, but as many of us know, even with a clear DNR and advanced directives in place, their interpretation mixed with stress and anxiety can bring out the least reasonable in all relations to the patient: spouse (s), parent (s), (step) child (ren)…

And yet, reality will eventually rule. The machine will be unplugged, either before or after the body has decided to unplug. And our hope, as spoken by one of our team members, is that there will be one clear-headed member of the family who will step forward to speak on behalf of the wishes of this patient to decide what is most gracious and best at this moment.  But, we all watch TV, sadly there is often far more drama than reason in real life as well.  Ah, what would McDreamy do? Sing and dance, probably.

Categories: Aging, Disability, Death, Dying

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