I did retirement home training and used to think it was a sweet job. Then I got in the business and underestimated how demoralizing it was as they give you the easy elders in training while the others make you, or at least me, really think of the fact the job just amounts to an unkarmic freebie.
I often feel the same working in mental health, especially with medically complex patients who have lost their own legal-medical decision making rights.
There’s the obvious high stakes ethical debates like if someone has a gangrenous limb that will kill them should you force them to have it removed. But there’s a lot more common / lower stakes examples I run into more often. Say someone has a dietary restriction that not following will likely cause great harm. Say they can’t swallow effectively (more common than you think, especially with strokes). This person is demanding a burger. It’s more likely than not that they will choke and die on that burger. Do you let them have the burger? You could argue that a sane person would obviously choose life over a burger but I might argue that American culture in particular makes the ability to
consume burgersenjoy life more important than lengthening it (not entirely true, OP is probably one of the few people here who wouldn’t be shocked what people put elders through in the name of extending life). In the end its a complex debate with a huge amount of individual nuance that I don’t claim to have all the answers to.I can tell you that I kinda wanna go work hospice where I don’t even have to ask any of those questions and can just give them the fucking burger.