Quote:
Originally Posted by Harry
Life begins when the dog dies and the kids have left home.
Having gotten that out of the way, I do not want to ever live in the state squarepeg describes her Dad and others. I have made that clear to my wife, along with the promise to haunt her forever if she doesn't tell them to pull the plug.
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I think I love you. And I'm with you re the end of life. As a nurse, I have witnessed and taken care of far too many pts on "life support", mostly because their families were in deep denial or religious fervor that "where there's life, there's hope." Well, I'm here to say that is really not true. Yes, there are occasionally "miracle" stories, but mostly with those, either the MD made a wrong prognosis or the whole clinical picture wasn't known or both.
My "favorite" one of these let's cling stories was my 106 year old pt who was kept on life support for almost 3 months, with all the resultant issues: bedsores, swelling and bruising of the arms and legs, pneumonia, MRSA, foot drop etc. And all because her great-grand niece insisted that "Auntie" had been at a family reunion the year before and found out that one of her distant cousins had lived to be 107 and according to this niece, "Auntie" made her promise that if anything (god forbid) happened to her, niece would make sure she lived to be 107, too.
We had the ethics committee in on that one. It took a long time, but the niece finally made her DNR, and then TLSS (terminate life support). It bankrupted the woman.
Not to be seen as a money-grubber, but really, for what? She didn't make her "goal" of 107 and she was tortured for the last 3 months of her life.
Most instances are not so over the top, but I've admitted more than one hospice pt insensible with terminal breathing whose family has panicked, rescinded the hospice only to reinstate it once the pt is in the hospital....
We have very fucked up notions of death in this country.
sorry for the tangent. I won't add to the OP except to say I am pro-choice for the most pragmatic of reasons: abortion will happen anyway and always has, so let's make it clean and safe, and let's emphasize contraception so that abortion is less necessary.