Euthanasia

I don't talk about Euthanasia, in order to set trends. I just want to plan a solid exit. You know, DIE.

But it seems if you have a disability, then that is political. Someone with MS arguing they have no quality of life is harder to take than someone with ALS (though Stephen Hawking just put out ANOTHER book, and he has it – but then he is the ‘good’ exception, but we don’t allow for other diseases to have ‘bad’ exceptions?).

I have noticed, as my grandparents were put into a morphine drip coma due to their children talking about pain control (VIHA is trying to get me into the palliative three month unit and I can’t morphine but tell someone that a 90 year old is in extreme pain….morphine ahoy!) and got prescriptions administered without even a doctor’s exam, just a phone call to a doctor, chart change and whee!, 10 days to death or less!

Not old enough to die young?

I am interested in Euthanasia as just that, a deliberate thoughtful choice to terminate life. Again I shouldn’t have moved I suppose as it is okay in some states, other countries but not here (unless you are a senior citizen – oh wait until the baby boomers get to be 70 – I think that policy might change). I have read the accounts of terminal hospitals, of the massive under-funding, and how as it is put in ‘Dancing with Mr. D.’: They just paid 50 million dollars for a machine to tell one type of cancer cell for another in the main hospital but here, in the palliative hospital, we don’t have enough staff so that your spouse does not lie in their own feces, regardless of how important they USED to be.

There isn’t funding for dying. There isn’t staff. There isn’t focus. Just because there is no choice doesn’t make you live forever, honest.

I appreciate that I and several other who read here fall into the category of “Oh my GOD, if I ever get like that, kill me!”

Once I lose the function to get the kind of ingredients to ensure a speedy death, or mix them up, then it is Euthanasia, before that it is just ‘suicide’. However, since countries which do it regularly know how to do it, they have you drink the drink, and less than an hour later you are dead. Is it a sin? Compared to what? How about lying in a bed, screaming obscenities in hopes that God is offended and kills you as one elderly lady woman I saw and sat with did? Or am I supposed to stay alive for a ‘political cause’ – which is odd as no one seemed to mind all the farmers walking into sheds during horse and mouth and pulling shotgun triggers.

No doctor, no effective pain control, no organization or individual wants to take responsibility. I do. I want to be responsible for my life and death. But I can’t. Not once I get too weak.

‘Act Now!’ – should I go boxing to ensure I have the strength to mix up those pills? To grind them and drink them? I have always believed that Euthanasia should be allowed as a choice. However, if the person is experiencing emotional or physical suffering that CAN be relieved, to be driven to a place where death seems the only reasonable alternative says a great deal about that society. And for those who want to ‘will to power’, it is hard to ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ if you can’t lift them, or the boots.

So what about it, Euthanasia as a reasonable option? Or the nice name: Suicide, before I become too weak.

My heart stopped last night, and my breathing: they both slowed and stopped. But then they started again. Curse it.

Look to Linda.