I am so sorry that your friend is suffering. I and many others went through the same process when my girlfriend was deteriorating -- talking to her doctors, researching all kinds of reported cures, or potential nutritional solutions, or reports of new clinical developments.
It's what we do to cope when friends and loved ones are faced with the hopeless, crushing reality of such devastating medical conditions. It's human nature.
After a month in the hospital during which my 56-year-old girlfriend's fatal condition was first diagnosed and she had surgery and radiation which left her unable to walk, she moved in with me so that I could take full-time care of her.
She improved somewhat over the next couple of months, but the improvement was just in terms of the initial side effects from the surgery and radiation. So even though she got to the point of walking with a walker, she still suffered devastating side effects from the oral chemo (nausea, loss of appetite, neuropathy in her hands and feet) and the progression of the metastases as the cancer pursued its inevitably deadly course.
I used to lie spooning with her and rocking her for hours as she slept, with my face in her neck, holding her so tight and praying for her, trying to bargain with God that if I could just love her enough, she would recover.
But then five months after moving in with me, she had a crisis on Christmas Day which landed her in the hospital for a week, after which she was moved into hospice for her final four weeks. (I wanted her to stay in my place so that I could take care of her until the bitter end, but her physicians finally convinced me that her care needs were more than I could realistically provide. So I pretty much moved into her hospice room and slept there most nights during that time.)
In her last couple of weeks, she became delusional and lost the use of her arms and legs. She drifted in and out of consciousness and came to the point where she didn't know my name or her own. She was on constant morphine for the pain and finally lost her ability to speak.
She was an internationally acclaimed classical musician who played many of the world's most famous concert halls, and recorded over 30 CDs, several of which were chosen Best of the Year" by the New York Times. But towards the end she didn't even recognize her own performances on those CDs when I played them for her as she lay in what I knew would be her death bed.
She finally gave up the ghost early one morning just before I woke up in the bed next to her. But the doctors had never been able to predict when the end would come, and she might have hung on for a few months longer. All they could say was: "Her prognosis is somewhere between short and less short."
So now, when I read the incredibly ignorant, sanctimonious, un-compassionate, mean-spirited and judgmental responses here from some of my fellow Freepers about Brittany Maynard, it makes me just want to puke.
