Replies

If your loved one has COPD, is 83 and is being admitted to the hospital for the 4th time in 6 months, should heroic life-saving measures be considered appropriate or simply delaying the inevitable?

Inevitable?

My dad is 76, smoked for 40 years, has COPD, and is on oxygen 24/7. He had 7 admissions in 9 months, and the doctors told him he had only 3 to 6 months to live.

That was twelve months ago.

And he has had no admissions since, and is in the process or retaking his driver's license, which he let lapse when the doctors told him he was "terminal."

I get real jaundiced towards people who throw around charges over the appropriateness of "heroic" life saving measures and "simply delaying the inevitable." You know what I'm saying?

Your dad is the exception, of course. And who cares if we're admitting terminal patients to the hospital 7 to 10 times. It's not like anyone's paying for that. And it's a completely appropriate usage of medical resources.

Death is not unChristian. And facing it without fear is completely appropriate, religiously and psychologically. Putting 80 year olds on vents 4 or 5 times doesn't make us more of a culture of life.

I share your concern over the tendencies towards euthanasia in our elite's teachings and philosophies. I do not find them practiced with any sort of frequency in my area. I find the opposite. Oncologists doing chemo up to the patient's last breath. Internists hoping the cardiologist tells the patient there is no more that they can do for their CHF while the cardiologist believes that's the internists' job. Ditto for COPD and the pulms. And it is precisely of the secularity of our culture, not the religiousness, that they fear having "the talk" with their patients.