GwynapNud the Braindead wrote:
Ambrya wrote:
Because I've watched a proud, independent man decline into a withered, helpless husk whose last conscious moments were spent lying on a bathroom floor in a pool of his own liquid *****, crying in humiliation and pain because he was too weak to hold himself up on the toilet while diarrhea seeped from his body--all because he didn't have the option to decide when and how his end would take place when he received the information that he was dying of cancer.
I won't go out that way. NO ONE should have to.
I empathise having experienced similar with a close relative. It was a degrading experience.
The most tragic part of my step-father's death is that he was robbed of his remaining quality months by a doctor who was so determined that he "didn't want [my stepfather] to give up" that he lied in order to coerce my step-father into futile treatments.
My step-father was diagnosed with lung cancer and an aneurysm in his descending aorta in the same MRI. Had he not undergone treatment, the best case scenario would have been that at some point before the cancer got too bad, the aneurysm would burst and he'd die quickly and pretty much painlessly. Worst case scenario without treatment would have been that he'd have had 6-9 months of reasonably decent and functional quality of life before the cancer became debilitating.
But he wasn't told that he had this option. He was told that in order to operate on the aneurysm, he needed to undergo chemotherapy to shrink the tumors in his lungs. Over the next four months--four months that he could have spent in relative good health--he got sicker and sicker from the chemo, eventually dying of pneumonia caused by the chemo weakening his immune system. The scene I described above was the one that happened between him and my mother a few hours before he was admitted to the hospital for the final time and died less than a week later.
But a few days before that scene happened, he was informed by his oncologist that the chemo hadn't worked to shrink the tumors sufficiently for them to operate on the aneurysm. The oncologist later told my mother that there had never been any hope of my step-father being stable enough for that operation, but that he had proposed a course of treatment he knew would be futile because he "just hadn't wanted him to give up hope."
What I want to know is, who the bleeding F'UCK was he to make that decision FOR my step-father? Instead of the 6-9 months of decent quality of life my step-father would have had without treatment, he instead had four months of increasing agony and degradation. While in Michigan, assisted suicide would not have been an option, certainly he had the right to refuse treatment, and those of us who were close to him know he would have done exactly that had he known the treatment would only make things worse and for no good purpose.
But that's the problem with the way we regard modern medicine--we're so focused on preserving life that we too often fail to consider the quality of that life. If my step-father couldn't at least choose when his inevitable death would come, at the very least he should have been able to choose how he would meet it.
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I could not agree more with assisted suicide but there should be checks and balances in place. A missdiagnosis can occur, medical advances can happen and I have at least one relative who was told she would not live past 20 (or if they did would be a cripple). They are now over 50 and living a full life.
Well, I can't speak to the systems set up in other countries, but if you read the page I linked above, there's a lot a lot a lot of due diligence stuff attached to Oregon's Death With Dignity Act to avoid exactly those sorts of situations.
I am so sorry that this happened to your family.