‘I Need to Know I Tried’ Time-limited trials offer I.C.U. patients and their families a sense of empowerment in the face of low odds. Credit...Elenia Beretta May 10, 2021 In 2019, Dr. Richard Leiter, a palliative care specialist, met a patient and the man’s wife in the intensive care unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The patient, in his 70s, had heart disease and kidney problems. But he had been living at home and doing reasonably well until sepsis, a life-threatening bloodstream infection, sent him to an emergency room. He had already spent several days on a ventilator, requiring drugs to keep his blood pressure from plummeting. Now, “his kidneys were no longer working and he wasn’t waking up at all,” Dr. Leiter recalled, adding, “We were very worried that he wasn’t going to survive.”