When my father-in-law passed, in a rural assisted living facility, we found they had stopped feeding him despite saying they were and our requests that they continue.
We were stuck in this uncomfortable position of not being able to move him somewhere else, being completely blindsided by his (bone and bladder) cancer and how quickly it progressed, and not knowing what standard of care to advocate for understanding that he was passing.
One of the things that was also frustrating is that when we would ask for more pain medication, they would refuse as it might lead him to stop breathing (I thought, ‘so what?’), yet they were making decisions that ultimately accelerated to his demise.
Looking back, I don’t know that ceasing nutrition was a bad choice, but it wasn’t their decision to make. When I talked to friends in healthcare they effectively gave me the ‘oh, you sweet summer child’ talk.
My FIL, while he could communicate, could not wait to be out of pain and I wish he had the agency to make the decision before having to go through endless pain in the delirium of opioids.
There are, of course, details I’m leaving out, but my general takeaway is that in at least some cases the euthanasia debate is not about whether the call is being made, but who is making the call.
That is not alone reason to support one side of the debate or another, but it is an important nuance that I was naive about until I witnessed it first hand.
Edit: what I described does not appear to meet the traditional definition of euthanasia, but I will leave the post in its original form and just clarify that I mean making decisions that hasten someone’s death either passively or actively.
The setup for 'Living Wills' and directives to doctors, at least in the US as recently as ~4-5 years ago, suck. I remember thinking at the time that I saw what family was filling out that they failed to express the nuance that I would like for my own directives.
Generally if there's still hope for recovery to a not-shitty life then I'd prefer to proceed towards that. Even as extreme as E.G. that Leadale anime's setup where the protag's broken from the neck down but can live in a VR gameworld (deeper immersion so they can still move, taste, etc). If there's still real hope for reaching that, it might be worth toughing it out and waiting.
However that sort of nebulous criteria that requires a human to evaluate isn't present. I can't empower the doctors with such vague goals and say 'make your best call as a HUMAN doctor with that vague goal'.
If that good route isn't an option, then I wouldn't want to stick around either... and the lack of a clear legal euthanasia option in much of the US pushes people to roundabout failures for lack of food / water intake, or just giving in to inevitable statistics when a cold or stressed body complication like a heart attack happen. Heck, if my brain's the part that's fraying apart and I want to die anyway, please harvest the working organs as my method of death so someone else can live better.
Both my grandfather and my aunt were palliative care towards their end. Their respective care providers kept asking them if they'd like to increase dosage of their medicine (can't remember what my grandfather was one, but my aunt was on morphine). Despite both of them at the time said that they didn't want to increase dosage, but the care provider kept trying to increase. My family's theory is that they were trying to speed their passing. Both cases were in Canada.
When my father-in-law passed, in a rural assisted living facility, we found they had stopped feeding him despite saying they were and our requests that they continue.
We were stuck in this uncomfortable position of not being able to move him somewhere else, being completely blindsided by his (bone and bladder) cancer and how quickly it progressed, and not knowing what standard of care to advocate for understanding that he was passing.
One of the things that was also frustrating is that when we would ask for more pain medication, they would refuse as it might lead him to stop breathing (I thought, ‘so what?’), yet they were making decisions that ultimately accelerated to his demise.
Looking back, I don’t know that ceasing nutrition was a bad choice, but it wasn’t their decision to make. When I talked to friends in healthcare they effectively gave me the ‘oh, you sweet summer child’ talk.
My FIL, while he could communicate, could not wait to be out of pain and I wish he had the agency to make the decision before having to go through endless pain in the delirium of opioids.
There are, of course, details I’m leaving out, but my general takeaway is that in at least some cases the euthanasia debate is not about whether the call is being made, but who is making the call.
That is not alone reason to support one side of the debate or another, but it is an important nuance that I was naive about until I witnessed it first hand.
Edit: what I described does not appear to meet the traditional definition of euthanasia, but I will leave the post in its original form and just clarify that I mean making decisions that hasten someone’s death either passively or actively.