My job isn't easy

Did I ever tell you about the guy who's life we saved? I came on shift on a Wednesday night last month and had this guy who wasn't doing so well. He went downhill all shift until about 4:30am. At this point it got so bad we had to call the doc to come up. He took a look at the guy and called his wife to see if she wanted him to be rescusitated if he ever stopped breathing. Obviously, she was pretty upset so she said she had to call her daughters and that she would phone us back. About 15 minutes after we get off the phone with her, the guy codes. No breathing, no heartbeat. Well, we haven't heard from the wife yet so we call a code blue. The code only lasted about a minute because the man started to breathe on his own again and he came around pretty quick. He was still having a hard time breathing though. I phoned the wife and asked her what her decision was and she said to just let him go if the time came. We did what we could for him to make him comfortable but his breathing was difficult and he looked like he was in pain. We gave him morphine for the pain, but that depresses the respiratory system and decreases his level of consciousness. So now it was either pain control or mental alertness all balanced with poor respiratory function. We called a code on this guy Thursday morning at 0530hrs and he died Friday morning at 1015hrs.