I was working in an intensive care ward as a resident and we had a hugely obese patient with appendicitis or cholecystitis I can't quite remember.. Whatever it was it needed to be removed at 3am in the morning.

So he has emergency surgery, it was very complicated and took over 5 hours to complete, complicated by his sheer size and general difficulty with the anaesthetic and his blood pressure.

He got through and recovered from the surgery ok but over the next few days he started getting fevers and the surgical wounds began breaking down. A more disgusting sight of openly visible abdominal contents you will never see. He required large foam padded dressings to cover his abdomen and needed to be changed twice a day, and he was placed on very high doses of antibiotics. He also started losing a lot of blood.

This guy was a Jehovas Witness. He stated he did not consent to blood transfusions. It was in the front of his medical charts written in large letters where the allergies would be.

This guy kept on slowly deteriorating over the next day or two. He eventually collapsed and required adrenaline and other inotropes to hold his blood pressure. He was in a coma for at least 2 days and his blood pressure kept dropping. So eventually the ICU consultant ordered multiple units of blood and he was transfused. He reasoned something along the lines of "his religious beliefs are being maintained because he is refusing the blood - but we also have an ethical obligation to save his life".

I never found out whether this man lived or died, and since I never heard about this in the media can only assume he or his family never found out.