This is a response for several posters here.
Last year, my dad entered hospice in the last stages of terminal congestive heart failure with only a few days left to live, an extremely common way to die these days. What happens is that a person’s lungs slowly fill with fluid and they slowly drown. This can take hours to days and is a truly horrible and excruciating way to die, and there is nothing that can prevent this from happening.
As this process intensifies, a liquid opiate and a benzodiazepine like lorazepam (Ativan) is given orally with an eye dropper in increasing doses. Frequently Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) is also administered as the opiates often cause itching.
Eventually the doses are high enough that the dying person is essentially in a drug-induced coma, but it is not the drugs that kill the person. It is the lungs filling up and drowning the person that kills them. The drugs do not hasten this happening, they simply render the dying person from being able to feel it.
These drugs are a mercy for both the dying person and the ones who love them. My dad’s family (me included) attended by dad’s death, and watched him carefully the whole time for signs of discomfort, and the hospice staff increased the dosage each time at our request whenever we detected signs of discomfort. It took my dad fully 48 hours to die after he became completely unconscious, so his suffering would have been unimaginable if he had been conscious.
The staff at this hospice were true angels of mercy.
Thank you for that explanation.