I’m on the fence with this sort of thing. While part of me wants to fight if diagnosed with a terminal disease, the quality of life issues certainly play a role, esp. when considering the indeterminate nature of some diseases like cancer. Do you spend years pumping poison into your veins for a 40% chance to live another 10 years, or do you take your prognosis, maybe go the palliative care route, and love what little time you do have left?
Dying without Christ is what I would fear.
I see the same with my profession.
If I were them, I'd spend any amount of Other People's Money to postpone meeting God, too. :)
The left has always pushed the death theme, it is what they do.
Death Panels
I wasn’t aware that to do CPR right it involved breaking ribs. I don’t want my last hrs to be filled with pain.
No thanks
On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically by Dr. Rudolph Nissen in 1948. He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it.Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.
Source: Wikipedia.
Having watched my first wife die from cancer over the course of 6-1/2 years I learned enough oncology to know this. I will take the most aggressive first course of treatment I can bear. If the cancer goes away, great. If it comes back, I’m buying a ticket to Bali or Tahiti. Then I’m coming home, see my family and friends and when it begins to hurt every day, there’s a nice bit of woods behind my house and a little .22 pistol in my safe.
I hope to go fairly early instead of burning up the kids inheritances. Load up on the painkillers and float away.
Author trying to show the nobility of death panels.
I don’t want to go into great detail, but during my last week of high school I gave a classmate CPR for 45 minutes, after a motorcycle wreck.
He died 3 days later.
That was in 1977.
I broke his ribs and swallowed his teeth and blood.
I was in Marine Corps boot camp a week later.
Yes, PTSD is real, and YES they should teach emergency responders, volunteers and pros alike, a bit more about the failure rates of CPR.
I was a bit of mess for several years after that event.
It took a heart surgeon friend of mine to convince me that my “guilt” was actually a form of pride, and that God did not expect me to do His job for him. Well, anyway, that is how I finally dealt with it.
If you have serious life and death issues, talk to a Doc. They learned how to survive long ago.
This was published in WSJ two years ago; I use it in my ethics class of nurse wannabes online, to discuss the ethics of doctors, not promoting death, but stepping back when the medical odds are greatly stacked against remission or cure.
Personally, I want to live here every single day that God has something for me to do, and not one day more—but not only can I not say that in my secular college course, but unfortunately the bulk of the class wouldn’t have the faintest notion of what I would mean.
Enduring torture every day just for a chance to survive a little while longer is not living at all. I need to get a living will in order. For the sake of my sons, I hope to go in relative short order, if not in a blaze of glory.
My brother and I are making decisions now on behalf of our 90 year-old Mother. Neither of us think she will last until Christmas. I do not want my sons agonizing over me about the best course of action the way we have. For my sons, it would be good to set them at peace with: I did the best I could, but I know I made mistakes. There are worse things than dying. I love you both, it’s time to go, see you down the road.
Watched a 90 year old relative burn through all her life savings at $6000/mo. for assisted living care over the last eighteen months of her life. It would be much smarter for families to pay a member of the family $3000/mo. to provide “assisted living” to the elderly and the care would probably be better.
To my mind a good many of the extraordinary care end of life treatment do not extent life at all.
They extend the natural process of dying.
I don’t see it, personally. If my condition is incurable, what is the point of another few weeks, almost certainly in either great pain or heavily drugged up? Sometimes, based on my mother’s experience, both.
This subject is of interest to me for two reasons...1) I worked in an ER for almost 20 years and saw lots and *lots* of suffering,death and tears, and 2) I had a near death experience as a teenager (house fire).If I was faced with a desperate,or potentially,desperate medical situation my (limited) knowledge of medicine might be of benefit to me in understanding just what I was being told and what might await me in terms of pain,disability,etc.But OTOH my near death experience (hint:your life really *does* flash before your eyes) has made me fear death a little less than I otherwise might.
One of my favorite sayings:
Life is a sexually transmitted condition that is invariably fatal.
Conditioning? Be smart like doctors and just give up?
This isn’t new. Doctors have been known to take the “Morphine cure” (OD), for the better part of a century, when they discover, and get confirmation, that they have a severe, terminal disease, most often pancreatic cancer.
Cardiologists are especially dour about outcomes, so often carry “No Code” around with them and insist their colleagues know their wishes. An irony, because they are one of the groups least likely to have cardiopulmonary problems.
Some other intelligent, but non-Medical people who are familiar with the medical system take a third option: an extended holiday in a third world country.
The rationale in this is that in places like Mexico, you can still get quality care for all the other health problems, if not the primary terminal illness, and at a fraction of the cost. Plus, they have a far better caregiver and attendant to patient ratio, nicer living places and better weather and food.
Doing this in one of the large ex-pat communities spares crippling bills to their family, and generally prevents the government and other busybodies from interfering with their life.
For those who are not terminal, the expense and hassle of getting care in the US has lead many to an odd option: taking a perpetual cruise ship trip. They calculated that for just a bit more than a dour nursing home they can live on a cruise ship year around.