My mother is very ill. Congestive heart failure, other complications, etc. She has made it clear and in no uncertain terms that she wants her DNR enforced. No ventilators for assisted breathing either. She’s only 66. She’s a nurse and spent the bulk of her 35 plus years working with the elderly. She has seen literally hundreds of terminally ill patients waste away over the last few months of their lives and wants no part of that for herself. She’s of sound mind and made her preferences clear. Who am I to act against them? Still, this is a struggle.
The difference comes when measures are taken (deliberate overdoses or other medications designed to end life, removal of nutrition and hydration) that will only result in death.
My M-i-L had polio as a child. Her parents were told that she’d never walk again but she did. She “burned new pathways”. She broke her ankle when she was 82. She was in a wheelchair for 6 weeks. When they tried to stand her up again, the 79 year old “new” pathways had stopped working. She never walked again. When she contracted pneumonia they wanted to put her on a ventilator. We said an emphatic “NO”. The reasoning was that her legs had quit working so we had no way of knowing if she’d ever be able to breath without the ventilator again. She made it until she was 88. There is NOTHING that isn’t pro-life in the choices we made. We were not trying to actively kill her and we absolutely were thinking of her future and quality of life.