Posted on 04/14/2011 12:45:28 PM PDT by wagglebee
Simon Fitzmaurice with his wife and children
DUBLIN, April 12, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a powerful op-ed in today’s Irish Times, an Irish man with degenerative motor neurone disease (MND) has revealed how he was heavily pressured by the medical community to refuse the ventilator that is keeping him alive.
After having been admitted to intensive care for pneumonia, a common complication for paralyzed patients, Simon Fitzmaurice began receiving assisted breathing and a feeding tube. Shortly after being admitted, Fitzmaurice said, a doctor came in and told him it was rare and expensive for patients to have a ventilator at home.
According to Fitzmaurice the doctor told him, with his wife and mother present, “That it is time for me to make the hard choice. He tells me that there have only been two cases of invasive home ventilation, but in both cases the people were extremely wealthy.”
“He looks at me. ‘This is it now for you. It is time for you to make the hard choice, Simon.’ My mother and my wife are now holding each other, sobbing.”
But Fitzmaurice’s instinctive reaction was for life: “While he is looking at me, my life force, my soul, the part of me that feels like every part, is unequivocal. I want to live. It infuses my whole body to such an extent that I feel no fear in the face of this man.”
Two days after this encounter, he wrote, he and his family were informed that the home ventilator he needed was covered by Ireland’s national health insurer, the Health Services Executive (HSE), and that the home care package needed to run the machine could be covered by the HSE and his family.
Fitzmaurice recounts that was later asked by a neurologist why he wanted to live, even though he had a degenerative disease that would eventually kill him. His answer: “Love for my wife. Love for my children. My friends, my family. Love for life in general. My love is undimmed, unbowed, unbroken. I want to live. Is that wrong?”
“Motor neurone disease is a killer. But so is life,” continued Fitzmaurice. “Everybody dies. But just because you die, just because you will die at some point in the future, does that mean you should kill yourself now? For me, they were asking me to take my own life. Or to endorse euthanasia. I refused.”
Experts say that Fitzmaurice’s experience is not uncommon and that incidents like these are becoming a trend in medical practice – a trend that has become nearly universal in developed countries, especially those with nationalized, government funded health care.
“Sadly, his story is all too common,” said Alex Schadenberg, head of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
Schadenberg said that philosophical trends away from traditional medical ethics, combined with massive tax-funded health care systems, have given rise to a new utilitarian-based ethical paradigm in treatment decision making.
Under this paradigm, called bioethics, Schadenberg said, “value judgments and negative attitudes toward people with degenerative conditions have led to imposing death on people who are vulnerable.”
Hospital bioethics committees now routinely decide to withdraw treatment that could save lives, based on the principle of “patient autonomy” that holds it is in the patient’s “best interests” to be “allowed to die,” often by the withholding of food and water.
These decisions are increasingly being taken without the consent, and sometimes actively against the will, of the patient and his family. In some countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, the new ethical system has led to legalized euthanasia and widespread abuse of the legal “safeguards” surrounding it.
Recent studies out of Belgium have shown that 32 percent of all legal euthanasia deaths are committed without request or consent by patients or families and only 47.2 percent of all euthanasia deaths are reported. In the Netherlands, the number is 550 deaths without request or consent each year and at least 20 per cent of all euthanasia deaths unreported.
Schadenberg said, “Everyone needs to be aware, society is already imposing death on vulnerable people and if euthanasia or assisted suicide becomes legal then it will simply be done in a quicker and quiet manner.”
As for Fitzmaurice, he writes: “I do not speak for all people with motor neurone disease. I only speak for myself. Perhaps others would question whether or not to ventilate. But I believe in being given the choice, not encouraged to follow the status quo.”
“I am not a tragedy,” he said. “I neither want nor need pity. I am full of hope. The word hope and MND do not go together in this country. Hope is not about looking for a cure to a disease. Hope is a way of living. We often think we are entitled to a long and fruitful Coca-Cola life. But life is a privilege, not a right. I feel privileged to be alive. That’s hope.”
you are completely full of it. Go back to my OP and you'll see that I said taxpayers should not be footing the bill for medical expenses that arise from personal choices that are known to have serious longterm health consequences.
Every medical procedure was revolutionary and cost prohibitive at some point. As it was practiced and refined and became more widely used, the cost came down.
if that were true, healthcare would be affordable without insurance, private or government, as it once was. Due to the governments intrusion into a once free market, the entire industry has become bloated, overpriced, and inefficient. The taxpayers are being bilked by the government and the healthcare industry and it has led to where we are now, broke and facing a $1.6 trillion budget deficit. Do you not understand the implications of a $1.6 trillion budget deficit? Do you not see the gravity of our fiscal situation?
Well, if they won't pay for it, they have made their choice, haven't they? People should have that right.
And as for "can't" pay for it, the subsidization of medical care has made it overly expensive. There is a whole lot of effective medical treatment that could be delivered very inexpensively. But those treatments are not often used because there is always somebody else paying the bill.
Human medicine should be a lot more like veterinary medicine. You get your regular check-ups, vaccinations and treatment at a reasonable price. Then if you get something that is going to be really expensive to treat, you have some tough decisions to make about how to spend your own money. Some people may save throughout their lives so they have something set aside for this rainy day, and others may decide to enjoy their money while they are young and healthy, so their options will be more limited. People should be free to make that choice as well.
Thanks for getting on this thread, metmom. This RC one is some sweetheart, isn’t he? (I’d bet money it’s a he...crude and focused on only one thing: money.)
Sure wouldn’t want him as a neighbor.
Can you imagine a neighbor who wouldn’t call 911 because the *government* would be footing the bill for it?
And of course, next time people want their house to be saved in the event of a fire, they’d better have paid into a private firefighting company.
Whenever they walk off their property, they’re on public streets. Perhaps we should require them to pay for the repaving of the road in front of their house while we’re at it.
I hope none of these people use bridges or public parks. That would be hypocritical indeed.
And don’t forget all the weather forecasting which uses information provided by the NWS. TO be sincere, people couldn’t depend on weather forecasts using information provided by the government since taxes are paying for that.
I wonder if their kids go to government public schools, or private or homeschool, on principle, of course.
Good comments.
That comment about the private firefighting company ticked off a memory. It actually happened that there was a story on FR about somewhere in the USA no public firefighting organization existed and everyone in the community was supposed to pay a yearly fee specifically for that service. Well, one unfortunate family did not pay for whatever reason and when their house caught on fire the firefighters showed up but refused to put out the fire. Neither would they accept payment on the spot!
I imagine that RC one really got his jollies if he read that story.
I imagine that RC one just rocks back and forth on his porch grousing about those freeloaders out there benefiting from HIS taxes. Must be hell to be him.
Doctors are supposed to save lives. If we do not value life, what do we value?
BS. Don't try to twist the debate. If you think I'm getting rich off medicaid/medicare, you don't know anything about medicine. (I don't even accept new medicaid patients, but I treat many patients for the local Free Clinic - for free.) And I'd walk away from medical practice in a heartbeat if I were in any way pressured to cooperate in euthanasia (which is highly unlikely, since I'm just a Podiatrist.)
This IS about medical ethics, and whether we as a culture are going to force people into accepting euthanasia, plain and simple.
So again, the question remains, which budget items are more important to you than health care for those who need it? Would you ration care in order to subsidize welfare checks? Planned Parenthood? A new aircraft carrier or nuclear sub?
Okay, I understand you now.
YOU are one of these leftists who loves government confiscation of money and you think that once the money is seized that the government should be allowed to do with it as it pleases.
You seem to forget that, as flawed a system as it is, people paid into systems like Medicare with the promise of healthcare. Statists like YOU think the state should now be able to do what it pleases with the money.
RC is a statist, statists LOVE death panels.
Every medical procedure was revolutionary and cost prohibitive at some point. As it was practiced and refined and became more widely used, the cost came down.
Statists really don't care about that, for them it's all about being able to kill of the untermenschen.
When someone loves money more than life we know what their choice will be whether it’s THEIR money or someone else’s.
bump
Actually the right to life war is no different than the class warfare that government fosters. Government has kept people of color poor but tenders the idea that it’s whites. Government tells the poor that it’s the fault of successful people that they are poor. Now government is telling people that the “useless” are taking their money and telling them that they have the “right” to object to life. Government wants total control, even over who lives, and they will pit people against one another because it works.
Yes. This issue is another front in the pernicious and insidious war against decency and goodness being waged by the forces of satan all over the world, especially here where some of us see it and are struggling against it. May God help us.
This is why Obamacare is so dangerous. This is going to happen here in the US. We must fight this as hard as we can.
The fearful thing about this is that this is a door to political genocide. If a conservative patient is in such a situation and his or her doctor is a flaming libtard, do you really think that doctor won’t take the opportunity to eliminate someone who has a differing opinion?
We need to really cut back on the Federal Governments ability to interfere with our lives. They are WAY out of control. Not only here in the US but around the world.
The straw keeps piling up on the proverbial camels back. It won’t be long until it breaks and all holy hell will break loose.
Excellent analysis!
Start? Do you expect us to believe that you contribute so much to health care that you can consider the Roman Catholic Church's contributions to be nothing? I find it hard to believe that you've ever contributed to the health care of anyone, much less anything on the scale of the Roman Catholic Church. You don't come across as a very generous person. You come across as stingy and judgmental. I think your poor personal choices are going to cost you more than those who ate too much red meat or went whitewater rafting on the weekends.
Yes. And it is so insidious because of how it’s framed by evil. It SOUNDS “reasonable”.
This is why the worst thing about socialized medicine is the fact that things that shouldn’t be anybody else’s business will now become everybody’s business. If you think the level of civility in this country is bad now, just wait until we get socialized medicine.
Thank you.
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