If you have ever seen the mayhem in many rest homes or the pain people suffer both mental and physical around the world, you might wonder why people cannot be as kind to other humans as they are to their pets when they become old and feable and can't function anymore?
For example, I have had to put to sleep more than one pet of mine as well as the pets of other family members over the years. And as I did this often I thought about how inhumane it is how we treat humans compared to our pets worldwide. Well Treated pets often are much better treated than old and terminal human patients around the world.
One year and a half ago my beautiful Long hair German Shepard-Australian Shepard mix who was the most intelligent and sweet dog I have ever met had to be put to sleep because he had not only gone blind and deaf but couldn't walk anymore either at age 15 1/2 years of age. So, I picked him up at 70 pounds and put him in my wife's car and drove to the Vet's. She came out to the car and as we sat on the back tail gate of the car she put an IV into his rear leg. As we pet him she let the fluid into his leg and 10 to 30 seconds later as we pet him he was gone. Why isn't it this easy for humans who have no hope of recovering ever from their ailments? Now his ashes are sitting in a case on my Grand Piano in my living room. We have our other dog's ashes nearby that was a Jack Russell-Corgi combination we called Maggie May that got into a fight with a raccoon over the trash cans and died 1 month later at the Vets years ago now. We also had to sit with her as the same vet put her to sleep when her kidneys failed from the fight years ago now. We bought another corgi for our daughter with papers then years ago and 8 months ago we also got an 8 year old Yellow lab Rescue dog to replace our Long hair German Shepard-Australian shepar mix that had lived with us for 13 1/2 of his 15 1/2 years of life.
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LOS
ANGELES — Beginning Thursday, California will be the fourth state in
the country to put in effect a law allowing assisted suicide for the
terminally ill, what has come to be known as aid in …
LOS
ANGELES — Beginning Thursday, California will be the fourth state in
the country to put in effect a law allowing assisted suicide for the
terminally ill, what has come to be known as aid in dying. Lawmakers
here approved the legislation last year, after Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old schoolteacher who had brain cancer, received international attention for her decision to move to Oregon, where terminally ill patients have been allowed to take drugs to die since 1997.
Oregon
was the first state to pass an assisted suicide law, and was followed
by Washington and Vermont. Under a Montana court ruling, doctors cannot
be prosecuted for helping terminally ill patients die, as long as the
patient makes a written request. With the California law, 16 percent of
the country’s population has a legal option for terminally ill patients
to determine the moment of their death, up from 4 percent.
In
the states with assisted suicide laws, the number of people who request
and take medication to hasten dying has steadily increased. In Oregon,
for example, 16 people ended their lives under the law in 1998, and by
2015, that number had grown to 132.
The
California legislation is strict, intended to ensure that patients have
thought through the decision and are making it voluntarily. Patients
must make multiple requests for the medication and have a prognosis of
less than six months to live.
Many
hospitals have not yet released policies for dealing with the law. And
no doctor, health system or pharmacy will be required to comply with a
patient’s request. Doctors who object to the practice are not even
required to refer patients who request the medication to another
physician.
Roman
Catholic and other religious health systems have said they will not
participate. “We are crossing a line — from being a society that cares
for those who are aging and sick to a society that kills those whose
suffering we can no longer tolerate,” José H. Gomez, the Catholic
archbishop of Los Angeles, said in a statement Wednesday.
Here is how two patients and two doctors are preparing for the new order.
‘I Don’t Want to Become a Burden’
Kristy
Allan, 63, lives in Placerville, where her small bungalow overlooks the
lush foothills of the Sierra Nevada. With her athletic frame, she does
not look like someone ready to die. But she has been under hospice care since the start of the year, having already undergone four rounds of chemotherapy since learning she had Stage 4 colon cancer
in 2009. She has already talked to her doctors about her desire to get
the medication that will allow her to die when she chooses, and she
plans to make her request formal this week. She does not know with
certainty when, or even if, she will take it. But she knows what would
make her ready to do so.
“I don’t want to become a burden to my family. I don’t want my husband to take care of certain hygienic needs. That’s my nonnegotiable thing. It’s a huge relief knowing it is legal. To have to take it, to go to the point where you know you are ending your life, that’s hard. But I know that I could do it when it comes to that point.”Continue reading the main story
Ms.
Allan has already defied some predictions. When her 30-year-old
daughter got engaged last spring, she wondered whether she would make it
to the wedding. But she did, designing and sewing her
mother-of-the-bride dress herself, and baking desserts for the
reception.
Ms. Allan has spoken to her husband and her two adult children about the decision.
“They’ve always been in support of me. They’ve never asked, ‘Are you sure?’ or challenged me. Last year they said there was a new drug available that would maybe give me another six months, but it would mean lab work once a week and low white blood cell count. Every time you start a new chemo drug, it’s really scary because you don’t know how you’re going to feel. I don’t know how sick I’m going to feel, how little energy I’ll have. I just said, ‘Enough.’ If there were really further curative measures, I would not be declining it, thank you very much, I would say, ‘Give them to me.’ But there aren’t any. I wasn’t going to put myself through six months of that. I knew I had six months in me. The fact is there are no curative measures. All along I was told I was not going to come out of this alive. With hospice, there are really no more tests to be done, no more treatment. It’s a relief.”
Wolf Breiman, 88, who learned he had multiple myeloma
seven years ago, does not know what will push him to the edge to ask
for the medication. But Mr. Breiman, who lives in Ventura, relishes the
idea of having the right to choose precisely when and where to die.
“Whatever gives you a sense of control over your destiny is empowering. I feel assured that in the circumstances, ... I’d be able to determine what to do. ... It just absolutely makes sense, it’s such a basic right to me. I don’t see how you can take the Constitution seriously and not agree that it’s consistent with the rest of the liberties we have.”
‘This Is New Territory’
Dr.
Sunita Puri, a palliative medicine specialist at Keck Medicine of the
University of Southern California, is writing the hospital’s policy on
the new law. To prepare, she asked her colleagues what they would do if
their patients sought help in dying. While more than 60 percent of those
she surveyed said they supported the legislation in theory, half of the
doctors who responded told her they would not prescribe the medication
themselves.
“My sense of talking to colleagues is they simply don’t know enough about what the medication will be, and part of it is not knowing if it is resulting in a comfortable experience that leads to their death. They take very seriously the obligation to support patients and not do something harmful. The other reason is that people feel very uncomfortable about what this act means for the changing role of physicians in society, what would be right for patients and what would be appropriate for them to do.”
Some
health care systems will make a psychiatric evaluation a prerequisite
for receiving the drugs. Dr. Puri has heard from many doctors who worry
that they are not fully prepared to determine whether a patient is able
to make the request to die, not suffering from depression or in the kind of pain that palliative and hospice care could alleviate.
“These are not going to be simple and easy conversations. Everyone wants what would be right for patients. The stakes are very high obviously. We assess for capacity every day, but this is new territory. There’s a difference between questions about it and wanting to pursue it, and that is going to require quite a bit of conversation, of back and forth between oncologists and palliative care doctors and the patients.”
In Berkeley, Dr. Lonny Shavelson
bristles each time he hears a doctor talk about discomfort with
prescribing end-of-life medication. A former emergency room physician,
Dr. Shavelson has just begun his own practice dedicated to providing
care for those seeking to end their lives. Here is how he imagines
talking to reluctant doctors.
“What I’ve said to them is, ‘Were you comfortable the first time you did chest surgery? Were you comfortable the first time you drew blood?’ I don’t understand when being uncomfortable became a reason not to do something in medicine. We make uncomfortable decisions all the time. When somebody says, ‘I am ready to end dialysis and let myself die,’ that’s a momentous decision and it might make us uncomfortable. The best answer I can get is that it is a difference of mechanics. But we’re agreeing that they are ready to die. It’s that the mechanism seems fairly irrelevant.”
Dr.
Shavelson, who will charge patients $200 for an initial consultation
and $1,800 if they move forward, said the most important response he
would have for any patient who approached him was simple: Why? He
believes the approach should not be different from any other aspect of
medicine.
“We always listen to the patient. We never tell a patient: ‘This is what you have to do. You have no choice.’ Yet at the moment when their life is ending — when they say, ‘I don’t want to live in this bed for the next three weeks waiting to die’ — it’s an odd change in the consent procedure. Suddenly they become wrong and we become right. That does not make sense to me. Dying should not be completely separate from everything else we do in medicine.”Continue reading the main story
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