The essay “A Crime of Compassion” was written by Barbara Huttmann. A story of love, dedication, moral values, and a nurse who loved her job and her patients very dearly. One of her patients was a young police officer who had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Within six months time, he had lost his youth, two of his five senses and his ability to do anything for himself. He had stopped breathing numerous times, and each time he was resuscitated. Eventually the pain became unbearable and he begged for God to take him. Being resuscitated wasn’t what he wanted anymore, he wanted to die. This nurse with so much love and so much knowledge relieved him of his pain and let him die. The public and the hospital then scolded her. She was labeled a murderer.

The author’s use of description was very detailed and very real. Reading this essay was like watching it on television. Every sentence was described with so much depth; there was no need to imagine the scenery or the excitement of the hospital. The healthy police officer was described as a young, witty macho cop with thirty-two pounds of attack equipment. When reading this, the vision of a man in a blue uniform with his gun and walkie-talkie enters the mind. When the man had been diagnosed with lung cancer he was described as a sixty pound skeleton being kept alive by liquid food poured down a tube.

The code blues were described horrifically. He stopped breathing two to three times a day, and every time he stopped he was resuscitated. “The nurses stayed to wipe away the saliva that drooled from his mouth, irrigate the big craters of bedsores that covered his hips, suction the lung fluids that threatened to drown him, clean the feces that burned his skin…” He was going through an agonizing ordeal, and he was being kept alive unnaturally. The pain he was enduring was far too much for any human or any animal to sustain. He begged to die, and only one nurse had the strength to give him peace. “Pain…no more…Barbara…do something…God, let me go.” The nurse saw the pain in his eyes and she couldn’t let him suffer anymore. She described his voice as being riddled with guilt.

The description in this passage was so exceptional, it made the story moving to read. The pain that was felt by the nurse and the patient was so real and intense. This essay was definitely a descriptive read.