I am always amused by the sympathetic terminology used in hospitals.
We were, on the whole, a lot more sympathetic than my dark comments suggest. It was, though, a last-resort type of place that fed an undercurrent of black humor. With 10 beds arrayed in an arc, you could stand in the middle and get the impression that these were 10 people relaxing on a very, very bad vacation, so the unit developed the moniker of Ventilator Beach. PBAB is a variation on an equipment order like "nebulizer at bedside", where FTD is the EOL inverse of the pediatric "failure to thrive" applied to folks whose bodies keep going beyond anyone's ability to believe it.

To the original 30-foot point....most of these folks had permanent arterial lines with a little stopcock and (depending on blood pressure) you could pretty much demonstrate that point anytime if you weren't careful with the stopcock. I should probably go back and delete my exploding man story, but it does stick with me as perhaps the most Serling-esque moment in my life.

A lot of her patients seem to be classed as GOB's (Grumpy Old Bastards) but I guess if you are 70 years old and have just had your legs removed, you probably wouldn't be the chirpiest of folk.

Nope. Much of our cynical humor came from the extraordinary treatment inflicted on folks by the unique American "it would be wrong if we didn't try everything" medical-legal system. Some of this has changed considerably over the past 2 decades, but I still joke that I will refuse hospitalization unless I can have a friend stay in the room with a shotgun! to keep the 4th-year medical students off of me!

Hadn't heard PBAB before, so it made me laugh

Good!