asha anandia and her team are treating a 60-year-old woman with multiple organ failure. >> we don't know which way it's going to go but i think it's important that it's clear to the family that the patient is almost as sick as she can be. do you have any questions right now? i know it's overwhelming. we don't know if she'll survival survive this. we often have to start thinking about what the patient would want in terms of things like remaining on life support for a more prolonged period. >> nurse kathy purcell has worked in the icu here for 30 years. >> patients get acutely ill and come into the icu and nobody has discussed it. not ready to let go and let's not do more aggressive measures. say to the staff of course mom would want everything done. others would say no, she wouldn't want that done. and the way that i help and a lot of us do is to say to the family members now if your mom were listening to us, you know what would she be telling us to do? or you know what was important to her in her life? i think if decisions were made by patients, prior to their admissions and expressed to