You’d Be Surprised at the Lengths Doctors Will Go for Dying Patients

Last week, a 75-year-old man was admitted to Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark only to learn he had days, or possibly hours, to live.

Carsten Flemming Hansen had internal bleeding and an aortic aneurysm—a bulge on the main vessel that delivers blood throughout the body. The hospital staff knew he was too sick for surgery, and it was only a matter of time before the bleeding ended his life.

So, instead of continuing treatment, they offered Hansen a different way to spend his last moments. They wheeled his bed out onto a balcony so they could honor his dying request: to smoke a Green LA cigarette and drink a glass of cold white wine. He got to watch the sunset with his family.

The hospital shared a photo on its Facebook page (which the family presumably gave them permission to do) writing that, even though there's no smoking in the hospital, the nurses and family agreed that Hansen's last wishes were more important than treatment and smoking rules. "This is his moment and his farewell to life," Inge Pia Christensen, the nursing director at the hospital, told a Danish news publication, per a translation.

Read the full story on Tonic.