Dad looked ready for space travel lying there in the ICU.
Tubes and wires hooked him up to costly machines precisely recording the metrics of his inevitable and upcoming demise. He didn’t have to do a thing, the robots were taking care of business: collapsing his lungs and filling them up; feeding and watering him; transporting the leftovers through expensive hoses to labs for weighing and measuring.
We had all the information but on his dying day (which stretched achingly to two and a half) we didn’t have Dad. The pain drugs and the impressive medical equipment jammed down his throat prevented him from speaking to us, his gathered family.
What we could do was wipe his brow, hold his hand, and make uncomfortable, one-sided conversations to be answered by the whoosh, whoosh of the breathing machine, the last sound we’d ever hear out of him.
He wasn’t in any pain, they said, but how could we know?
What was important was the letter of the law. And that every last minute of “life” they could get out of him was spent on this earth, and damn everything else. What we had was a familiar piece of meat in suspended animation. It was like a mortuary viewing except he was alive and we knew that only because the lines on the monitor were not flat.
I don’t want to go that way, he’d complained months earlier, get me a gun. No, we cried, the thought sickens us.
My mother wouldn’t allow the legal option depriving him of food and water; the silly woman wouldn’t watch her husband die of starvation and dehydration.
My Dad died a bloodless, soulless death over which he had few choices — dignity wasn’t one of them.
It was somebody else’s death, not his own.
Please vote Yes on I-1000. It’s the compromise between the not-so-benign neglect of starving someone to death, and the violence of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. It puts dying back in the hands of the dying.
For me, it’s that simple.
[Michael Hood publishes the media blog BlatherWatch.]
Did your father express an affirmative interest in a hastened death? Because if he didn’t, then I-1000 wouldn’t apply.
Why is this issue all the sudden so urgent? Why this initiative now, which clearly begs as many questions as it answers?
I think some folks are itching for a fight with the Palinistas, and recognizes this polarizing issue as an opportunity to do so.
No thanks. Not my kind of politics, not solving the kind of problem I need legislation to solve (SJ has written about more typical end of life scenarios that what I-1000 envisions).
When my time comes, and should I dedide to take affirmative action to hasten my death, I won’t need the courts to do that. Me and anyone I would call my doctor will be able to deal with such issues without something as simplistic and heavy handed as I-1000.
Michael
Again a very sensitive posting BUT … I-1000 not only would not have helped your dad it might have made it worse.
Under I-1000, at least as I understand it, the PATIENT must execute her or his own death using the drugs provided by the physician. Your Dad was in no position to make that request.
So I-1ooo wold have had no (good) effect on your families choices. BUT, I worry it could have a bad effect if the courts were to decide that I-1000 does establish a standard of practice for all physician assisted death. That standard requires a second, independent opinion PLUS it may require a sign off from someone “qualified” to make a psychological evaluation.
While this standard seemingly should not apply to your Dad, since he was not conscious and if he were was probably not in a state where he could take a psychiatric examination, it is likely .. given hospital concerns with compliance that the hospital would have required that whoever (your Mom?) had the power of attorney meet with a second physician before your Dad’s doctor would be allowed to prescribe the usual palliative, but life shortening drugs. Moreover, that physician is likely, again given compliance rules, to have to be outside of any exiting interactions with your Dad and probably not a colleague of your Doc. Finding such a person may be difficult. I can not say enough about how hard it might become if there is some social worker or psychologist involved as well.
There is another, very difficult to discuss issue here, and that is how a physician and a family reach a consensus to end life. I-1000 makes that decision very explicit. While this might work with the rare terminal individual whose psychiatric state is NOT affected by her disease, I am not certain that the best approach in your family’s situation is as legalistic and formal as I-1000 appears to be.
Finally,. I-1000 fails to address the all to common issue of $$$. I have had many friends go through the same thing you describe, watching as procedures eat up what is left of a family’s money .. perhaps depriving a spouse of the funds she might need for her own care. I-1000 avoids this important because it overlaps the issue of financial incentives that may encourage suicide. The obvious answer is a refomred healthcare system that does offer at least some level of terminal care.
Um, who took him to the hospital? The family, I imagine. Well, what do you think a hospital’s going to do??
If you didn’t want him hooked up to “fancy, new-fangled hoses and wires and such,” you should have kept him at home.
I support I-1000 for democrats running for office in 2008, hey who am I to get in the way. hhaahahaha
I just want everyone to give it up for Earl who got his legs crushed last week…. Ah Earl could you stand up and take a bow… hahahaha.. Um Earl??
I bet I could have gotten seven responses in three hours from a post by just typing out the alphabet.
Mistakes were probably made. But this was 15 years ago when the consciousness was not as high around the dying process as it is today. Hospice was a new idea, and my parents of a generation who examined fewer alternatives in such things. He had a spell, my mom took him into the hospital, it was degeneration over a week or so. My Dad’s instinct was correct, however. I pray we get the means to die in the self-proscribed way that’s in this legislation. This only goes for humans: trolls should suffer ugly deaths, then go to hell.
Hey Goldy, every day me and Dutch and Mr. Cynical and the other rghtwingers come onto this blog and ridicule you asnd your beliefs and turn these threads into a sewer and along comes a sockpuppet to make fun of us and you delete all his posts. But our posts criticizing you are allowed to remain. You FUCKING LIBERALS ARE FUCKING WIMP ASS LOSERS. You will not fight. You have no fucking spine. there is nothing to you but talk. We rightwingers will be back tomorrow to smear you and your beliefs and you will eat it up. Hell if enough of us start posting you’ll pay for more bandwidth. Absolutely fucking incredible. You think this shit would fly on a rightwing blog. Hell no! We have balls!
Touching story. Even though the other some of the comments are pretty insensitive, I can imagine even they would feel compassion for the idea if it was them with the hose up their noses and down their throats.
Thanks for sharing. I certainly will support I -1000.
Peace out.
Give me a fucking break. Who do you think you’re persuading publishing that drivel on this site? Roger Rabbit? Daddy Love? RHPEE6033?
They’re already shills for ‘Big Death’ and they want more people dead so that their ‘wealth can be redistributed’ via the death tax. This initiative isn’t about people, it’s about generating revenue.
P.S. You’re a butt munch
@2- If you read the post more carefully, you’ll note that Mr. Hood’s father had requested a gun while still able to communicate. So, I-1000 may have applied at that point. I cannot vouch as to his mental condition at that time: I try to refrain from making Terry Schiavo-like judgement calls on these sorts of things.
@9- (does anyone else hear a high-pitched whine?)
Thanks for sharing your story Mr. Hood. Everyone needs to hear stories like this: it brings the point behind this initiative home in a visceral way. It also shows just how many of us are touched by the cruelty of the current laws.
“Butt Munch”?! OMG, I haven’t heard that one since 6th grade! Who do you think you’re persuading publishing that drivel on this site?
Let me see if I got this right. This guy writes this maudlin post saying what a great, compassionate humanitarian he is, then turns around and says anyone who is a troll should die a horrible death then go directly to hell?
Compassionate humanitarian my ass.
Why didn’t your father have a DNR? Your situation didn’t need the government endorsed suicide bill.
He may have been in pain before, but this whole post is about him being in the hospital…should have had a DNR…..everyone should make sure to have a will and these things done.
Michael
I do not think this legislation accomplishes your goals.
The number of folks using the law in Oregon is small. Clearly there is much less demand than anticipated by the proponents.
Even for those 50 or so folks using the law, we have no way of knowing whether the law has made this choce easier or harder. As noted by Charlie Kee above, the actual prescription of these drugs is now legal/ Though the intent may be more subtle than some folks would like, as far as I know there has never been a legal challenge to the current practice.
The number using Oregon’s law may be smaller than anticipated for at least two reasons. First, the class served … people wishing to die sooner after being diagnosed with only six months to live and with enough peace of mind to be able satisfy the pyschological issue, may be very small. Second, since prescribing this cocktail is not illegal, the added requirements of I-1000 may put many off.
The bottom line is that the Oregon law seems to have had little effect. So, one can choose to argue against I-1000 as accomplishing nothing or for it because it seems to have done little harm.
In my opinion there can also be harm ctd
ctd …
To explain why I think there can be harm, let me tell my own story of a recent death.
My 92 yo Dad had been sick for several years. We knew that eventually he would die as a result of accelerated aging changes in his lungs attributed attributed to many years of tobacco smoking as a (much) younger man.
This time he went into the hospital and … as with your Dad .. there was the usual terminal issue of prolonging life vs. prolonging suffering. We … my Dad, the family, and the medical team worked together in a way that I will always treasure to find a golden mean. He worked out his wishes as to how much effort he was willing to make to keep alive and conferred legal authority to one of us in case he could no longer express those wishes. When the time came , quietly, knowingly and with great love he was helped through these last few minutes.
I understand that some would say that this story is about a wink and a nod. That is a terrible oversimplification of a process that I suspect is impossible to define by law.
I am afraid that legalization of something that is not now illegal would create its own troubles. As it happened we did have some dissent in the form of a rabbi, a friend of the family, and one non-immediate family member. If we had been in Oregon, I can easily imagine that there could have been insistence that a second physician and a psychologist be called. The Oregon law and I-1000 are very unclear about who these arbitrators might be but it is not hard to imagine the basis for legal mischief. In the worst of situations, it is not hard to imagine docs who turn such a thing into a “specialty.”
Because the designation of legal authority was very clear and frankly because of the skills fof the physicians in managing us all, there was, in the end, no problem.
So, based on my own recent experience and the talent of the crew at Boston University School of Medicine, I am grateful that we did not have to jump through extra hoops.
I do, however have one more concern, ctd.
SeattleJew- I would respectfully argue that Oregon’s experience in passing this law is a powerful argument for passing I-1000. Since there didn’t appear to be a rush of grandchildren seeking to knock off grandpa for his inheritance money, perhaps the fears that there will be a wholesale abuse of this initiative are relatively groundless.
Goldy has called me many things in the year I’ve posted here. Valuable contributor isn’t one of them!
Obviously this is Goldy being sockpuppeted.
This sucks for Goldy, and all us regular posters.
Time to go to an account type blog.
SOCKPUPPETS! Why I oughta….
To da moon, Alice! To da moon!
It’s kind of funny to hear a guy who calls himself ‘Mr. Cynical’ complain about a FAKE Mr. Cynical cynically putting words in his mouth.
“I am a child molester.” Mr. Cynical
ctd.
My final concern is based on another story.
The story is almost identical to my Dad’s story with one exception … my friend and his dad had less money than we did.
As his Dad approached death, he was approached by the social workers about ways of becoming impoverished. In his state, you can get terminal care in a hospice or hospital if and only iff you have the money or have so little money that you qualify for state funds. There are even specialized social workers and even nurses who make a living helping people plan for impoverishment. (my sister in law once had such a business)
Imagine the pain his friend’s dad went through as the “system” systematically drained his funds .. especially because those funds were important to support his surviong but quite ill wife, now his widow.
There is NOTHING I can do that overstate this Kafka-esque situation.
What would I-1000 have achieved in this case? My guess is that my friend’s dad would have sold a few days of his life to allow his wife to have some dollars to relieve her own end.
If you will permit me to be macabre, this story shows a “fatal flaw” in I 1000. There should never be a financial incentive to die. The moral stress placed on the patient in this story is too cruel to imagine.
The story also shows a second “fatal flaw” in I-1000. The law puts the decision to offer a suicide cocktail in the hands of the same individual responsible for the patient’s care. Under HMO rules, that individual’s pay likely will depend on the costs of care for his patients. As proud as I am of my colleagues, I fo not think anyone should be placed in that sort of conflict of interest.
So, wiht respect to a lot of good friends who will vote for I-1000, please think about the oath that we physicians take on graduating medical school:
primum non nocere first, do no harm.
@19 bananaphone
The way the Oregon law, and I 1000 are written, seems to me to provide protection against the soap opera image of eager heirs dispatching gramps.
What the law does not do is counterbalance the incentive of certain kinds of health care systems, esp HMOs, to encourage suicide to save themselves costs.
Still, so far it does not appear that this has been a problem in Oregon. OTOH, the law seemingly is little used there. Oregon, hoever,is very middle class state. Consider heat wold happen at an inner city hospital … like Harbor General in LA that recently went broke. Do you really beleive the system would be even handed when the cocktail costs maybe $50 and terminal are might cost the hospital 200k or more?
I understand those who feel that the shield of the law might make death easier to obtain, but the numbers from Oregon suggest few people have sought that benefit. OTOH, the potential for abuse is so high that it seems to me that I-1000 may have far greater risk than any benefit it might bestow.
Again with the doubletalk.
“Dyin’ Ain’t Nobody’s Business But Your Own”
Except that I-1000 MAKES it the government’s business!
Up is down. Black is white. “Government regulation” is the government getting out of your business.
Insane.
@24
Pudge
Someone is inane and ut seems ot be you.
Oh well, what would I expect of a Palinstinian?
@25 It’s not like these Palinstinian are actually popping out all over. Most of them have multiple personalities so it just seems like there’s a lot of them.
We may disagree with Pudge about everything under the sun but at least he hasn’t gone fucking nuts on us.
Shrug. Just pointing out a fact: I-1000 puts more government into “death with dignity,” not less.