State-Sanctioned Torture of our Terminally Ill Patients
I cannot understand why Congress is spending all this time debating the state-sanctioned torture of terrorists when it allows it to go on everyday in American hospitals and homes.
A close and beloved relative of mine has inoperable pancreatic cancer. He decided to forego chemo after several treatments since the doctor said further treatments would only get him an additional two months of nausea and vomiting and an inability to eat.
He was diagnosed last December. He did relatively well until the last few months. Over time his body has become as bone-crushingly thin as survivors of the Holocaust. There is one big difference. He has no hope of being freed of his cancer. To say he has a quality of life of any kind is to mock life.
He has done everything society has allowed him to do. He made a living will. He brought in hospice and they are doing a wonderful job in trying to relieve pain. He has a twenty-four hour live-in to take him to the bathroom and clean him.
He is lucid only periodically now and hospice tells us he is probably within the last two weeks of his life. When lucid, he says consistently, "I just want to die." The rest of the time he sleeps in bed and asks for morphine when the pain becomes too intense. He hallucinates and can no longer carry on a coherent conversation.
However, even though he often told us that he did not want to linger and suffer a long and painful death, the state requires that he do so. In the name of life, no less. He is being tortured because of the irrational ideology and theology of people and a state who have no other interest in him than as a symbolic object of public policy.
No one could look at him and say that the best is being done for him. He has seen and visited with all his grandchildren before he entered this last phase of illness. He was long ago reconciled to the idea of death. The best that could be done for him is what he needs and wants, allowing him to take a life-ending painless medication.
In this final death stage, he tries compulsively to sit up on the side of his bed as though he wants to get out. When asked if he wants to get up, assuming he can understand, he says "no" he just wants to lay down and die.
We asked the hospice nurse why he was sitting up so often. She said it happens all the time with the dying. They even have a name for it. It is called "terminal restlessness." The patient doesn't even consciously know he or she is doing it. According to the nurse, it is symptomatic that the patient is restless to get his or her death over.
I've heard the garbage about how if people are given the choice between living with the absence of pain or death, they will choose to live without pain rather than death. That is a canard, a hoax, used by ideologues who are trying to stop other states from passing Physician-Assisted Suicide laws as in Oregon. At some time, anyone in last stage of death will suffer so much, they will opt for death, just as a person being tortured will.
My relative is not in excruciating pain, thanks to hospice. However, he is ready to go. Yet the state won't let him have that right. They may not mean to, but the forces that create these obstacles for the terminally ill are torturing them at their most vulnerable and weakest state. This last few weeks in my relative's home has not been about some inexperienced, unsympathtic, dogmatist's silly concept of the "sanctity of life."
It has been about the denial of a terminally patient's right to die with dignity.
A close and beloved relative of mine has inoperable pancreatic cancer. He decided to forego chemo after several treatments since the doctor said further treatments would only get him an additional two months of nausea and vomiting and an inability to eat.
He was diagnosed last December. He did relatively well until the last few months. Over time his body has become as bone-crushingly thin as survivors of the Holocaust. There is one big difference. He has no hope of being freed of his cancer. To say he has a quality of life of any kind is to mock life.
He has done everything society has allowed him to do. He made a living will. He brought in hospice and they are doing a wonderful job in trying to relieve pain. He has a twenty-four hour live-in to take him to the bathroom and clean him.
He is lucid only periodically now and hospice tells us he is probably within the last two weeks of his life. When lucid, he says consistently, "I just want to die." The rest of the time he sleeps in bed and asks for morphine when the pain becomes too intense. He hallucinates and can no longer carry on a coherent conversation.
However, even though he often told us that he did not want to linger and suffer a long and painful death, the state requires that he do so. In the name of life, no less. He is being tortured because of the irrational ideology and theology of people and a state who have no other interest in him than as a symbolic object of public policy.
No one could look at him and say that the best is being done for him. He has seen and visited with all his grandchildren before he entered this last phase of illness. He was long ago reconciled to the idea of death. The best that could be done for him is what he needs and wants, allowing him to take a life-ending painless medication.
In this final death stage, he tries compulsively to sit up on the side of his bed as though he wants to get out. When asked if he wants to get up, assuming he can understand, he says "no" he just wants to lay down and die.
We asked the hospice nurse why he was sitting up so often. She said it happens all the time with the dying. They even have a name for it. It is called "terminal restlessness." The patient doesn't even consciously know he or she is doing it. According to the nurse, it is symptomatic that the patient is restless to get his or her death over.
I've heard the garbage about how if people are given the choice between living with the absence of pain or death, they will choose to live without pain rather than death. That is a canard, a hoax, used by ideologues who are trying to stop other states from passing Physician-Assisted Suicide laws as in Oregon. At some time, anyone in last stage of death will suffer so much, they will opt for death, just as a person being tortured will.
My relative is not in excruciating pain, thanks to hospice. However, he is ready to go. Yet the state won't let him have that right. They may not mean to, but the forces that create these obstacles for the terminally ill are torturing them at their most vulnerable and weakest state. This last few weeks in my relative's home has not been about some inexperienced, unsympathtic, dogmatist's silly concept of the "sanctity of life."
It has been about the denial of a terminally patient's right to die with dignity.
posted by Marshall Darts at
7:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home