Genetic testing

The three examples are not the same kind of problem, and saying so is the sharpest observation available in this discussion. The first two are genuine ethical dilemmas: competing goods with no clean answer, where autonomy pulls against a duty to preserve life and where a surrogate's authority may or may not reflect what the patient would have chosen. The third is not a dilemma at all. A colleague diverting a controlled substance is a reportable act of professional misconduct with a defined pathway, and the difficulty a nurse feels about it is not moral uncertainty but the social and personal cost of reporting a colleague. That distinction, between a dilemma and a distressing but clear obligation, is worth making explicitly. Say which of the three each is, and the post acquires an organising principle rather than three unconnected reactions. The third is distressing without being uncertain, and those need different treatment.

Genetic testing is named in the opening and repays a sentence of its own, because its ethical problems are structurally different from bedside end-of-life questions. Testing produces information about people who did not consent to be tested, since a result concerning a heritable condition implicates siblings, children and parents. It raises the right not to know, which sits awkwardly beside the duty to inform. And it carries discrimination risk in employment and insurance that legislation only partly addresses. For your own example, the brief asks for the feelings you experienced, which is an unusual and deliberate instruction: it is asking about moral residue, the discomfort that persists after a defensible decision, and naming that honestly is what distinguishes a reflective post from a procedural one. Describe the decision, the framework you used even informally, and what stayed with you afterwards. Moral residue is the technical name for it, and using the term signals a reflection with a literature behind it.