In 1999, a Japanese nuclear worker Hiroshi Ouchi got a deadly dose radiation when a material he worked with got critical, and all of his skin, slowly begin to fell off.
treatment. Was this the time to shift the focus from cure to palliative care? Even if a case could be made for persevering a bit longer, what purpose could possibly have been served by resuscitating him on the 59th day, after his heart stopped three times for a total of 49 minutes? This was a man whose chromosomes had been destroyed. “None of Ouchi’s chromosomes could be identified or arranged in order.” Ouchi’s body was destroyed from the inside out. It was a slow, painful and presumably unpreventable death. Surely the doctors should have been able to recognize very early that he could not be saved.
