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Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com with another quick tip for families in intensive care.

So yesterday I had an email from a reader Claire and Claire writes, my 34-year old brother has been admitted into intensive care with liver failure.

Now, the ICU team is suggesting to us to give him morphine and midazolam and let him pass away because his liver is failing. They wouldn’t recommend putting him on life support going forward. But we feel like it’s way too early to give up on our young brother and we would really like to have any insights from someone that understands intensive care. If you can get back to me, that would be great.

Well, Claire, that is so sad to hear about your brother, but here is the reality, you’re right on track that your brother needs to be given all treatment options.

The biggest challenge for families in intensive care is simply that you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what to look for, you don’t know what questions you need to ask, and you don’t know how to manage doctors and nurses in intensive care.

You’re talking about literally ending the life of a 34-year old gentleman of your brother that can most likely live. You need to go on life support and you need to have the liver failure treated.

Now that might take a while, but at such a young age, he has probably any chance to survive. The survival rates of patients in ICU is over 90%. So the odds are in your brother’s favor and what you need in this situation is, you need strong advocacy.

So you can challenge the doctors on the clinical level, and we can help you with that here at intensivecarehotline.com because we are professional advocates and we do understand intensive care inside out.

We do understand patients’ and families’ rights in intensive care, which the ICU team makes you believe you have none, but you do have rights. You just need to exercise them and you need that input from somebody that can advocate on a clinical level with the intensive care team.

So your brother needs to go on life support. He needs to have the liver failure treated, and he needs to have a chance to recover from this critical illness.

At such a young age, I mean, going to hospice and having morphine and midazolam started to let “nature take its course”, which is what you have written in your email what the intensive care team wants. That is murder. There’s no other term for this and that is simply murder. And your brother needs to have every treatment that is available to be had, and then he can recover from this.

So that is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care and you need advocacy and consulting, you need someone that can advocate for you with the doctors on a clinical level that understands intensive care, go to intensivecarehotline.com and call us on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or send us an email to [email protected].

Like this video, comment down below what questions you have and subscribe to my YouTube channel for any new updates that come out at least twice a week.

Take care for now.

This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com and I’ll talk to you in a few days.