Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER

by Farzon A. Nahvi

while our government chose to ignore that same evidence, making recommendations based on what happened to be available rather than making available what happened to be required.

But once that threshold is crossed—once “very sick” becomes “dead”—everything converges into a single pathway. Ultimately, there is one treatment protocol for death: CPR, oxygen, and a small handful of medications. Unlikely as it seems, whether the cause was a heart attack or malaria, the treatment of death is always the same. And so, just as death is the final landing place for all the divergent and individual lives that came before it, the medical treatment of death, too, is a final common denominator.

The truth is that we do not liberate these patients from their disease, but reduce their sentences down to life on parole. Our most incredible medical miracles prolong life at the cost of living.

A person who dies in a hospital is not acknowledged as dead upon their last breath, as nature may dictate, but is dead when their physician declares agreement with nature’s assessment.

These circumstances feel bigger than our ability to communicate them. Feeling something so powerfully, yet finding oneself unable to communicate the depth of that feeling, can be deflating. We are left feeling powerless. So, unable to adequately communicate our experiences, we often stop trying to communicate them altogether. Counterintuitively, it is the very magnitude of their importance that might be the cause of our failure to address them.

would quickly learn, however, that such circumstances—situations where nothing actually goes wrong and yet, at the same time, nothing goes quite right—are not uncommon. Through the nature of our work, we encounter them almost routinely.

life sometimes contains no perfect solutions and no “correct” courses of action.

We are routinely presented with the impossible situation where there exists no right thing to do.

The ideas that life should be preserved, that individuals should be able to make decisions on their own behalf, that human suffering should be alleviated, that we should hold out hope that people can change for the better, and that we should be respectful of the decisions that others make even when we disagree are basic, fundamental beliefs that we all hold.

Too often we scroll through our smartphones for the duration of a forty-five-second elevator ride, preferring the dopamine of our mindlessness over the discomforts of our unresolved thoughts.