Post #52810

Please don’t take any of this as being directed at you personally, I think your opinion is 100% valid, but you’re the only one I saw with this stance. I think this is something very important to consider when it comes to things like living wills and just how we as a society feel that a medical system should operate, preserving life at all costs vs preserving quality of life. I won’t go deep into details, but I have been there to witness the passing of both my wife’s parents in the last 2 years. Both were normal for their age and overall health conditions up to the very days they died. Both died suddenly, though not immediately, and one was upset they called the ambulance because they said they were fine, both those ended up being last words. Both became unrecoverable very soon after being admitted to the hospital, as in less than 12 hours. The family made the decision to take them off the life support stuff, as there was nothing treatable. A fair decision. But what I witnessed afterwards was the cruelest stuff I have ever seen. It isn’t like on tv where they turn the stuff off and in a couple seconds it’s over. The sights and sounds of suffering were horrific, and all of us who were there just had to sit for hours, watching our loved ones in total unconscious agony while we were all just wishing for it to be over. After I saw firsthand what natural death can look like, I thought it was a sin that with all the equipment and medicine in that hospital, that no one was allowed to end the suffering, either for the dying, or for the living. It looked and sounded like physical torture, it was undignified, and I sat there the whole time saying we would not leave an animal to suffer like this, so why are we letting it happen to our family? It really solidified my thoughts on assisted suicide and the concept of keeping someone “alive” at all cost. I get if you want to be in your own home instead of hospice someday, or that you shouldn’t have all your freedoms as long as you’re not a danger, but we don’t all get the luxury to die in a brief moment in our sleep. For a lot of us, it will be a long processes, and it won’t always be us conscious or able to make determinations on that process. Again, just sharing my personal experience, nothing to argue against you in particular. I just find myself able to consider and discuss death more than most people around me seem comfortable doing.