“Is it quality of life? Is it living as long as you can? Is it being comfortable? Those are the kinds of things that I wish we had talked about.”
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“Having a sense of the possibilities in advance is essential to minimize surprises, make specific requests for end-of-life symptom management, and decide the possible paths available to you.”
“What is fundamentally the difference between a doctor pulling a plug on a machine that provides lifesaving nutrients to a person that could potentially stay ‘alive’ on it for years, and a doctor prescribing pills to a person with mere days or months to live to end their unnecessary suffering?”
“I was reluctant to force the issue. What remained unsaid came with its own set of consequences.”
“The sentence that sent my blood pressure skyward was this: ‘Even if my patients are beyond pain, there is also a cost to those who are forced to perform emergency efforts that is just that: a performance.’”
Jewish law states the dying are to be considered, for legal purposes, “like one who is alive for every purpose”, capable of wielding the same power over their lives until their very last moments, as they did in their days of health.
Had she been the family’s beloved old Labrador or suffering Boston Terrier, we would have taken her to the vet for a final loving, humane act, a choice unavailable to her family, doctors, or caregivers.
Even though I would argue that most deaths aren’t good, we improve the quality of death of the vast majority of people we care for, often substantially. And there isn’t much that’s more satisfying than that.
It just doesn’t make the death good.
With the assistance of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies and Exit International, I surveyed voluntary assisted dying (VAD) advocates and supporters around the world to inject some much-needed data and objectivity into the VAD debate.
It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own.
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