Quote:
Originally Posted by tweezers74
I think suicide is such a broad topic that it needs to be discussed in more detail. With both needing the proper medical intervention. You have the people who commit suicide because of mental illness/depression. This is where the person needs psychological treatment. Their body wants to live but their brain doesn't. On the other side of the spectrum, you have assisted suicide. In this case, their brain wants to live, but their body doesn't. The interesting thing about assisted suicide is that you have to look at how medicine has advanced in the last several decades. Science and technology has given us the ability to keep people "alive" for a long time. I put that in quotes because we can keep people breathing/heart beating for an infinite amount of time with interventions when if untreated would most likely die much quicker. I think hospice is the "happy medium" for both sides. But if certain religions can REFUSE medical treatment that would most definitely save their lives, why can't some people ACCEPT medical treatment that would not prolong their life?
It pains me to hear that a cancer patient died in pain. Because assisted suicide is illegal, it is feared to give that "lethal" dose. As a hospice nurse, I helped manage a lot of patients and their pain meds. Morphine isn't the only medication out there for cancer pain. You have oxycodone, even methadone, to control pain. You have different delivery methods, long acting, short acting. We, as healthcare workers, have failed if we could not ease the pain of a cancer patient. Just as I fought hard to keep somebody alive, I needed to fight equally hard for my patient to die a peaceful and pain free death. It was my job, my duty, my responsibility to help patients find a medication to ease their pain. And I would say 99.9%, I was successful. A lot of people think hospice was a death sentence. Our goal was not to make death less painful but find a way to make LIFE less painful so that the limited amount of time our patients had could be spent with their loved ones, not fighting pain.
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My uncle died in 1978. I don't know what pain drugs were available back then but his hospice nurse could not give him more morphine because it would be a lethal dose as I remember. It was a long time ago and his wife and children were in charge of his care.
My father in law slowly faded away from Alzheimer disease. That is a case where no one that has seen what it does to a human would want to live like that themselves. He was very physically fit before his brain failed him. It took many years to get to the point where he did not remember how to chew. He finally died from dehydration because he would not drink because he did not know how to swallow. It was a very slow torturous horrible death. I would much prefer a lethal injection to existing like that. It sure was not living in any sense except a legal one.