It seems medical technology has advanced to the point where difficult end-of-life decisions must be made. People didn’t have a lot of options in the past. Now they can keep people alive well beyond where they once would have died.
Personally? I don’t think hydration or nutrition should ever be withheld from a patient (who can take them) in order to hasten death. On the other hand, I witnessed a loved one die a very long, excruciating death from cancer. There was point where the person no longer existed, and the only apparent options left were horrible, unremitting pain or drug-induced unconsciousness.
There’s a point where death is a blessing. I don’t want a doctor hastening my death, but I also don’t want one trying to keep me alive only to suffer mind-destroying levels of pain when I’m beyond hope. Unless someone has had a loved one go through a death like that, they have no business criticizing someone who has.
Well said.
The truth about hospice care is that it is in most cases, compassionate care, compassionate to the patient and to their families. I knew two people, the nieces of my husband who both received in home hospice end of life care. One died in her late 20’s from acute leukemia within six months of her diagnosis. The other battled breast cancer for several years before it metastasized and went into her lungs and brain.
They were cared at home by dedicated around the clock hospice nurses. They were able to meet their inevitable end in the warm, comfortable and familiar surroundings of their home surrounded by family and friends and children who could be with them 24-7 in a non hospital setting.
In both their cases, the cancer treatment, chemo, radiation, etc. had stopped as they were fruitless and only palliative care, nutrition, fluids and pain medication like morphine was given. But in their final days and hours the pain would have been excruciating without the morphine.
The thing that some people don’t understand is that in the final days and hours before death, as internal organs start shutting down, fluids accumulate around the heart and in the lungs, making breathing a struggle and an excruciating one at that. What morphine does is to not only relieve the pain but it also depresses respiration, relaxes the patient and opens up their air ways. The fluid still builds up still ultimate kills them but the morphine makes the process less horrific – no desperately gasping and struggling, realizing they are drowning in the their own fluids and contorting their bodies or even having seizures or strokes as they gasp for their final breaths.
If a person is in their very last days or hours of life and administering morphine eases their pain, even if it by its properties, it hastens death by only a few hours, I do not consider that euthanasia.