End of life care: is it reasonable to perform procedure after procedure on someone who is dying in the hopes of prolonging their life for days or weeks?

This is a question that I have had to deal with in my life. My mother got sick with what the doctor thought was pneumonia. As all the conventional antibiotics did nothing to help her and she declined dramatically to the point where she needed to be put on a respirator and the doctor started to suspect that she had a terminal illness we were faced with a question: do we unhook her from the respirator and let her pass away gently or do we keep going with killer doses of steroids in the hopes that something might change but knowing she would more than likely burst a lung and die on the respirator? We chose taking her off the respirator.

I believe you must do what you think you need to do when a loved one is critically ill. But I also think that we all need to have conversations with the people we love so they know what we want in the event you become uncommunicative. I also believe that doctors need to be honest about the chances of the different procedures and caution against procedures that won’t provide a marked improvement of their chances.