Even if I was older than dirt, I'd at least want to know what's up. There are things that are easily fixed, i.e. with meds, and others that aren't. If it isn't easily fixed, you can still go home to die. You don't have to agree to any treatment.

G

After watching several people go through cancer treatments, I think that if I were diagnosed, I would save my insurance company a few million, and just let nature take its course .

spent 3 or 4 days in the hospital a few years back.

nice local place, great staff (no misspelled pun intended), etc.

never want to do it again. it's damaging to the soul. I can certainly understand an older person saying '**** on that, i'll die on my terms'.

This. Many types of cancer and horrible diseases can be treated and cured. At the very least many can have treatments for the symptoms, and make live more comfortable.

I do for sure believe in a LEGAL medical assisted end of life. My uncle died a horrible horrible death from cancer. In the final days he was on morphine at such a heavy dose that any more would kill him, yet he would scream in agony when trying to move him enough to change sheets. No one wants to go through that. No one wants to see it. Let them go. I fully understand it is a slippery slope, but there has to be a way.

hospice is, in my experience, simply upping the morphine dosage until death occurs.

It depends on what color the last thing I ate was.

Which brings us to those profound philosophical questions, of course.

The whole assisted death thing is a red herring.

Death has been 'assisted' in our medical system from the beginning.

Some will say it is just how one reads between the lines, but to me there is a fundamental difference between actively giving someone a lethal dose of a pain med, and a pain dose that is so large it overwhelms the autonomic nervous system and you stop breathing.

One is a direct action (choice), the other is a side effect. A HUGE difference between two.

IMHO, pain should be controlled/avoided as much as possible. Killing yourself before you get to that point... well that's 'your choice' and you should have to put that into action YOURSELF. Don't drag your Dr. into it. They will have your back WHEN YOU NEED IT if you let them.

My dad had esophagus and lasted ten years after the surgery... at the end it returned, he couldn't eat and just got weaker and weaker until he died in his sleep (but he got an extra ten years!)

My mom had colon cancer about twenty years ago, she had surgery and they gave her a year or two. She turned 92 this year.