8mm
Posted on 12/03/2007 8:01:11 PM PST by Coleus
During the last two months of life, Dorothy Glas endured so many blood tests her thin arms turned black and blue. The 85-year-old woman submitted to probes of her abdomen. Radiologists scanned her brain, kidneys, thyroid and heart. A psychiatrist screened her for depression. "My mother told him, 'Of course I'm depressed! I'm dying. How can you be happy?'" said her daughter, Meredith Snedeker of Hamilton Square. Glas withered to 80 pounds from an intestinal infection and, after a fall, entered the hospital in July for the final time, complaining of dizziness and a cut foot. The medicine revved up and doctors at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton ordered a flurry of tests: X-rays, CT scans, echocardiograms and scopes of her digestive tract.
Kidney specialists examined her. So did gastroenterologists, infectious disease specialists, neurologists, internists and a cardiologist, according to a 22-page Medicare summary. Her daughter said she felt helpless as the tests and consultations snowballed. Glas, a former nurse suffering from several serious chronic ailments, including heart disease, slowly sank into the kind of high-tech death she always feared, even though a living will spelled out her wishes and she spoke up to oppose many of the tests.
"Blood gasses. EEGs. EKGs. The closer she got to death the more tests they did," the daughter said. Then, after an apparent stroke, the elderly woman stopped eating and a physician suggested that what Dorothy Glas really needed was a feeding tube.
"I was in disbelief," Snedeker said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
Perhaps I should read all of this but good grief! Couldn’t someone in this poor woman’s family step up and say ENOUGH?
Bump for later reading
“The closer she got to death the more tests they did,” the daughter said.”
As a “medical doctor” on The Monty Python Show said
(in so many words):
“We can perform a total cash-ectomy!”.
This is why we need physician-assisted suicide. People should have the right to say STOP, and not be forced to suffer longer than they want to. We’re being forced to fork over gazillions of dollars to the government for Medicare, and a huge chunk gets spent on people who don’t even want it. Somebody wants a $10 lethal dose of morphine, and instead they get half a million dollars spent tormenting them in their final months.
Well.....I wouldn’t call it PHYSICIAN ASSISTED SUICIDE....I’d call it.....CHOOSE your own health care and options......what I think you are referring to is “respite” or “pain” care.....helping people endure the end without horrible pain.
That should be up to the person whose life it is. Some people would like to go out quickly rather than “endure” just because some other people think they should be forced to “endure”. It makes little difference whether the “enduring” consists of hopeless waiting for death while severe pain is drugged away, or endless tests and procedures on a person who knows full well they’re never going to get out of the hospital alive. It’s the state, doctors, religious moralists forcing their will on other people. Not something that should be happening in a country where the Constitution guarantees individual freedom.
They need to be referred for hospice care, where they are kept comfortable while they die at home. My Mom is in hospice care. It’s wonderful.
Put me on an ice floe (if there are any left after global warming). Give the money to someone other than the healthcare "system".
So.....Medicare killed another patient? Boy, just can’t wait until all of the nations elderly have nothing but Medicare to rely upon after Hillary makes private care illegal!
I disagree with your premise with every ounce of my moral fiber.
“Right-to-die” advocates always seem to forget that once a crack appears in the thin veneer that holds our society together, technology and perfidy will pervert and alter those “good intentions” into something unrecognizable.
To wit, the gradual erosion of and ignoring of vagrancy laws, or perhaps the growth of the pornography industry from a time when “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” was considered quite risque to the rather disturbing “art” available with a couple of mouse clicks.
What starts out well-intentioned always has unforeseen circumstances, the so-called “unintended consequences” of rule making and altering.
How long, pray tell, will it take your much vaunted “Right to Die” to be twisted into a “DUTY to die” by those with an interest in cutting cost to their fiduciary interest? With enough money and lawyers, it looks like anything, including basic natural rights can be removed or ignored. Look at the utter nonsense fomented by the left over the 2nd amendment, which is written so plainly a 3rd grader can understand it.
I understand the grief and torment involved with the loss of a loved one (G_d knows I’ve lost enough myself, some to truly horrid deaths), but I am opposed to anything that allows the thin edge of the wedge to further denigrate the sanctity of human life.
What these doctors did to this woman was no less reprehensible, but you can bet that had her insurance stopped paying for the information gleaned from their “guinea-pig”, the quacks would have stopped torturing her and her family.
Regarding “right to die”, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Ping.
“I read somewhere that for the average person, fifty percent of their healthcare expenses occur in the last six weeks of life. What a terrible waste.”
1/3 of all Medicare dollars are spent in the last 7 days of a person’s life.
You're contradicting yourself here (assuming you don't know what the word "fiduciary" means, since you are apparently using it to mean "financial"). You're saying that the solution would have been for the insurance company to cut costs, obviously the route that would be in its financial interest. First of all, you're missing the little detail that there was no "insurance company" -- this was a Medicare patient, and all this was being done on the taxpayers' tab. But more importantly, you're making the same point you object to, namely that attention to cost control gets the best result.
Let people make these decisions themselves, with their own money or with a market rate private insurance policy, and they will indeed decide at some point that they have a "duty to die". This woman might very reasonably have decided that using her savings to provide private school or home school educations for all her grandchildren would be a better use of her life savings than keeping herself alive in miserable condition for a few extra months. That should be HER decision, ideally made in writing long before decision time arises, lest she be unconscious or mentally foggy when the time comes. Personal sacrifice for the benefit of others is not an evil thing that government or "society" needs to stamp out.
The "thin veneer that holds our society together" has become the thick veneer of forced payment by government tax-and-spend and government hyper-regulation of private concerns. And what's being held together isn't a free society, but a society whose values and actions are dictated by government, which insists that everyone "get with the program" no matter how much they may object to the program. You think prolonging the lives of people want to die is a horrible waste of huge amount of money? Tough -- the government already took your money and everybody else's money, and has decided that's how it's going to be spent, and will make and enforce laws making sure that's how it's spent. Sorry, that's not anything I'm interested in preserving.
It's also a dangerous and slippery slope letting ordinary citizens have guns without even having to get permission from the government. It's just that prohibiting them from having them is a far more dangerous and slippery slope.
Well,
our Dr. finally wrote “DON’T WEIGH HER ANYMORE!” on a patient we were weighing weekly. She’s super contracted, has bed sores the size of basketballs, is demented and is dying. The act of weighing her, even with a bed scale was agonizing.
HOWEVER, we got a G tag because she was losing weight and we weren’t be agressive enough in trying to find a way to keep her weight up and keep her from dying. She refuses to eat, has refused a tube feeding (when she was lucid) and is on Hospice. Doesnt’ matter. We’re still supposed to go after her with great guns.
Believe me, a lot of facilities are caught between the common sense side of the cycle of life and surveyors from hell who demand you do everything you can- weight, tests, labs, meds, consults....right up to raising Lazurus.
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