Ethics of Preforming Codes

Today was a busy day. First client was a hospice client that family decided that they wanted everything done to try and save him. Problem is that he had cancer that had spread to his bones, most importantly it had spread to his ribs. I understand not wanting to watch you family member die, and my heart goes out to them. However, when your father is downing in fluid that is is his lungs, his heart has a tumor in it, he has a GI bleed, and is septic, enough is enough. As the nurse we must go proceeded with all life saving measures, even when we know that there is no hope. So, when he stopped breathing, we place an ET tube . When his heart stopped we did compressions, which ended up breaking every bone in his frail chest. Wehad to placed chest tubes. We went on and on. Every measure we did gave him an addition 30 minutes of suffering it seemed. I feel that he was in pain every time that we brought back, yet we are unable to give pain medication because it would hasten his death. We talked with family, yet they were in denial. Finally, I brought family in for them to witness the last set of compressions. I believe that they needed to see for themselves that by attempting to keep him alive, we were only prolonging his pain. After 3 hours of code after code, he finally past away. Even though we did everything for him, I feel that we were wrong for not letting him die in peace without pain.