ethics 101

recently i remembered a lesson form our ethics class last sem, the book we used gave us a specific incident that directly affected ethics, so the situation was, the nurse in the story had a dying patient with so many complications, (sorry i can't remember what his disease was) anyway the patient went into cardiac arrest and was flat lining so they had to revive the patient, he became stable again, then it happened a second time again he was revived, it happened a third time and again was revived. it is a hospital protocol to revive any patient as long as the chart does not specify a Do Not Resuscitate Order. the problem in this situation is that the patient is so diseased he is now paralyzed and brain dead, prolonging his life would be like torturing the man, as a nurse there is nothing we can do but stand by, but ethically it poses a question, should we let him go on with a life so horrible? or should we just let him go? sometimes the family is given the option to place the do not resuscitate order yet sometimes love is literally blind, they think of how much they love that person, of how they can't live without that person that they are blinded and they can't see that the person they love is going through the hardest part of their lives... there's this popular txt message going around about why at an early age we were taught how to close open our hands, they said it was a simple way of teaching us how to let go... anyway i think im going around in circles already so this is where this ends, i'll get back to this topic when i've gathered more insight