Assisted suicide expands...

[Havok1]

In a free and informed society?



...and that's why the government can't be involved. I don't want the 80% of medical practitioners that are leftists and marginally competent to be involved either, but I doubt I'll ever make enough money to actually get the good ones. A DNI will have to suffice for me. Would pair it with a DNR, but many of that 80% take a DNR to mean not even providing basic CPR.

How do you think it should be handled?

 

[TheDan]

How do you think it should be handled?

There needs to be some middle ground between not providing any life saving care and keeping people hooked up to life support indefinitely, but in my experience I haven't seen it. They'll intubate you and force you to keep breathing while semi-unconscious even if there's no hope of recovery.

If there's a greater than 50% chance of recovering, then sure I'd want all the life saving care available. If recovery is unlikely, then don't force me to stay alive. Are there any kind of orders to give your doctor for that?

 

[benenglish]

tl;dr - This is just me venting so feel free to skip the wall of text below.

If there's a greater than 50% chance of recovering, then sure I'd want all the life saving care available. If recovery is unlikely, then don't force me to stay alive.

The choice, absent obvious preexisting conditions, never seems to be that binary, that quantifiable.

Many years ago, I was off on a business trip for a week. My mother and sister were in the living room, watching TV, which is where they both spent most of their time. Both were disabled and unable to do much more.

Since my sister has a mechanical mitral valve, she's on blood thinners - warfarin. What we didn't know because her cardiologist hadn't placed any serious emphasis on regular testing was that she was taking too much. That stuff is basically rat poison. She began bleeding internally, not in any one specific spot but basically her blood was weeping out through the walls of her stomach and intestines.

For those interested, there's been some back and forth in the medical community about the necessity of protecting the valve from gunking up and failing vs. the fact that too many people bleed to death when on warfarin. Fascinating reading but beyond the scope of this thread.

I was gone so sis couldn't tell me to take her anywhere. She just felt bad, lethargic, and the color of her already pale skin was fading away to white. Mom noticed and began asking her on Tuesday if she should call an ambulance. Sis always gave the same answer "No, he'll be back on Saturday morning and if we need to go, he can take care of me."

Mom gathered up sis's driver's license, insurance card, and implanted defibrillator card and asked every day if she should call 911. Sis always refused, wanting to wait till I got back home.

On Friday afternoon, sis slid off the couch. As she was going down she said "Mother, help me." She never calls our mother "mother." It's always mom. Something big was happening but sis was unconscious and couldn't provide any insight. Mom called 911. In a couple of minutes, 4 firemen were in the living room, then a paramedic walked in. He took a very brief look at her, looked at the firemen, shook his head, and told them "We gotta go." Those men rolled her into a blanket and hauled her out before the gurney could get in the front door. Classic "scoop and run." Mom gave the IDs to a neighbor who had come over when the fire truck arrived. Since mom couldn't move well enough, the neighbor accompanied my sister to the hospital.

The neighbor had no authority to order anything. Mom wasn't there. Absent any other guide to the extent of care the patient might want, the hospital did everything they could to save her life. Her hemoglobin (Hb) was 2.3. They infused her with 19 units of blood or blood products while shoving a camera down her throat, looking for a bleed. They found a couple of minor ones they fixed but the pictures from the procedure basically make the inside of her stomach look like a watermelon, with red stripes of blood weeping from every part of the lining.

Mom called me in class and didn't do a good job of explaining but I figured out enough to know that I needed to get home. I ran out of the training and left for the airport to get any flight to Houston.

By the time I got to the hospital in the wee hours, sis was stable in an odd room (kind of like an operating room, but with the bed on a raised platform with a great deal of unfamiliar equipment affixed to the ceiling directly over her) in the emergency department. I went in to see her and she was totally cold and unresponsive. She was intubated and not breathing on her own. The doctor who had worked so hard on her sat with me and told me that, as far as he could tell, she was gone. Brain activity could most charitably be described as "minimal." I checked for a pupillary reflex/response and only noted a weak, inconsistent twitch.

I was advised that recovery, if it happened, would almost certainly leave her in a profoundly mentally compromised state. When the neurologist who was empowered to make a determination of brain death came in on Monday morning, he'd make that call. However, the doctor told me to gather any family that needed to be there and be prepared to withdraw all medical support.

On Monday, the neurologist found a bit more on the EEG than was documented over the weekend in the ER. He advised we wait and see.

Sis was in a coma for 2 weeks. When she started coming out of the coma it was clear that she had lost a fistful of IQ points. That didn't matter; she had plenty to spare. Over the next months, she had to learn to walk and talk again but that, too, didn't matter. She was alive and functional.

I said all that to say this - Sis had, in the judgement of several doctors, effectively zero chance of recovery. But since I wasn't there to tell them that they could discontinue (or simply not begin) treatment, they had no choice but to do their best.

I thank God I was on that business trip. If I had been home, I would have gone to the hospital with sis, been given a summary of her condition on Friday night, made the decision to discontinue care, and would have buried her the next week.

So "a greater than 50% chance of recovering" is, to me, a useless metric.

This is why assisted suicide is so much of a quandary to me. Knowing when the end is inevitable is pretty much impossible in many cases. Yet there are folks who would offer "medical assistance in dying" for PTSD, depression, or just being old.

I think that assistance should be legal. But I don't really think it's a medical decision for which legal and medical criteria can be competently established and reduced to writing. It's a decision to be made, after getting the full and frank input of doctors, by patients and their loved ones. They are the ones who have to live with or die by their choice.

 

[Vaquero]

It's a plate full, being MPA for another human.

 

[TreyG-20]

After watching the effects of cancer and what it did to my mother and the whole process of treatment while I was a teenager, I made my mind up about this long ago. I'm not going out like that. If im terminal, I'll say my goodbyes and head off into the woods somewhere never to be seen again. **** that cancer BS.

 

[Eli]

‘I’m 28. And I’m Scheduled to Die in May.’

Some right-to-die activists want everyone to have access to euthanasia—even young people with mental illness. Are they also making suicide contagious?

www.thefp.com

Eli