On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
The flip side of our ability to prolong life more and more successfully is that we equip ourselves to extend suffering more and more unbearably.
Puritanical attitudes around the right to die will impact a vast majority of people in terrible ways that will largely get ignored as on the other end of it the victims have no voice and often the family is mourning and wants to move on or just doesn’t even fully realize how terrible that end was.
But the doctors and medical staff…
The people I know well in those roles get upset when healthy patients take a turn for the worse and die when they had so much life before that. But by far the most upset I see them is when a family member of a patient decides because of beliefs to choose life prolonging options that are the equivalent of extended torture.
As our medical capabilities improve we really need to continually rethink just what it means to “do no harm.”
My grandpa passed a year ago now, COPD. Likely honestly a heart attack after all the steroid meds for his lungs created heart problems including a heart aneurysm. When he was diagnosed way back in 2006 they told us he had 5 years if he was lucky, I didn’t think he’d see me graduate HS. Well he had a lot more than 5 years in him but after about 2014 it was all shit. He started telling my grandma that he was ready to die, wanted to die, in 2018, he begged for it on hard nights. He tried to kill himself in 2021 and 2022. Both attempts left him strapped to a hospital bed “for his safety” as he struggled to breathe, he hadn’t been able to reliably breathe laying on his back for several years by then but they didn’t care as long as he lived.
I never felt anything but sympathy for him after those attempts. As someone with chronic lifelong asthma, I know how my end will go. I know what it’s like to suffocate and struggle to breathe and in case anyone wonders, it fucking sucks. It’s terrifying, it’s slow, and you know it’s coming. Panic is inevitable. He felt like that for nearly 10 fucking years. He told me once after it had gotten bad that he’d always felt so bad for me as a kid to have asthma but now he finally understood, he said I was so brave to have dealt with it for so long but in that moment I didn’t feel brave I felt lucky. When I use my inhaler I can breathe again, for him it just made him struggle less. For a long time I wished he would die, my absolute favorite person on the planet, and I wanted them dead. It destroyed me mentally for years. When he finally did die it was horribly sad and also such a massive relief for everyone to know that at least he wasn’t suffering anymore.
I say all this, partially to get it off my chest but mostly to say, if we are going to prolong life we need to also give people the option to check out. Life isn’t life without quality of health, it’s just suffering. Prolonging suffering makes use torturers, it’s not a saving grace. If we have the capacity to do this for our pets then people deserve the same mercy.
Ideas and times progress, maybe it’s time to change that oath to something along the lines of “do the least harm”.
Best thing to ask your doctor is what they would do in the same situation. They usually give you the bestg medical advice answer but their personal answer can be very different with what they have seen. Although some won’t answer that question which is in itself a kind of answer.
My mom was an RN and spent time doing basically everything. She said her time in oncology, geriatrics, and hospice made her never want to treat cancer or undergo prolonging, because the chance of it extending the quality life was slim and quantity isn’t worth it when it’s miserable.
She died of cervical cancer when I was 23 (it was stage 3 by the time she went in for dx, so she knew something was wrong and chose not to do anything about it) and the only treatment she got was oxycodone and having me get weed for her for the intense nausea that comes from smoking cigarettes on oxycodone. She was in hospice though.
I, similarly, probably won’t undergo treatment if I am similarly afflicted, unless our treatments evolve from a toxic cocktail to something with more chance of working and fewer horrible side effects.
yeah if we get crisper vaccines then great but radiation and chemo well there better be like a 99% chance of reversal.
There are actions you can take to catch it in Stage 1 or 2, which is far more treatable. You would also likely qualify for generic testing, which checks to see if you have generic markers which make you more likely to get cancer.
I’m aware. She chose not to go that route, and I can’t say I blame her really. She cared for both of her parents when they died of cancer, and having done that as well, yeah. I still wouldn’t go for highly toxic treatment either, even if it does have a better chance caught early. Screw that; I’m already full of medical issues, don’t need to feel worse.
I’ve already undergone genetic testing due to family cancer history. I’m clean for maladaptive genes, as far as they know for now (I have several unknown mutations, I get letters in the mail every few years when they figure one of them out). But the world is a lot more polluted than it used to be, and I haven’t always made the healthiest choices in life, so… meh.
Like I said, if treatments change maybe, but I’m not injecting a toxic cocktail. And a lot of early-detection cancers they find and treat aren’t ever going to kill a persons anyway because they are too slow growing. So even that early screening isn’t without risk.
We need a federal constitutional amendment of bodily autonomy. Abortions, tattoos, personal drug use, gender reassignment, plastic surgery, suicide, neuralink, etc. All the same issue: My body, fuck off. You can make it more complicated than that but it’s not.
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with face tattoos or not. Nobody is making you get one. It’s not your concern. An artist can choose not to give face tattoos, as a doctor can choose whether they want to give a vasectomy to a young child-free man. But the government should have no say about what a person is allowed to do or have done to their own body. The government can regulate to make it safer, but not disallow.
Absolutely.
It must be tough to get to the end of your life and see nothing but people looking to profit off your passing.
Put me in a coffee can and blow it up or something.
I always said: “just put me out with the trash”.
The cost of anything death related is so immensly high, even the cheap options are too much imo.
Budget Cremation: they toss the body in a dumpster and set it on fire.
My mom said the same thing most of her life. When it came down to it, (bone cancer in her hip) she asked to be cremated, and her ashes scattered somewhere she’d never been. That’s hard to do, she’s been a lot of places.
Personally given how fucked my brain is from mental unwellness, I’d like my remains to be studied for whatever I can provide to the future of modern medicine.
Hey, it’s how 99.9% of the rest of life went! Lol
Humans are supposedly 60% water but for me, at least half of that has been replaced with coffee by now.
The woman in the article is 65 Years Old. She is old enough to remember some of the third places that were free to exist in.
Which probably makes it worse…
What’s a third place?
Not home, not work.
Or school, for those young enough to still be going to school.
Ah yes, those places largely no longer exist.
A lot of third places (aside from things like parks) did want people’s money. Malls, cafes, arcades…
The dying and dead are great people to fight for, you get to name ANYTHING your heart desires and claim you’re doing it for them.
The dying can contradict you and you can just blame it on delirium “See! They’re so crazy from illness that they think they don’t need me, that PROVES that they need me!”, and the dead will quietly let you exploit them for sympathy!
For the last 10 years I have been saying this should be legal. As long as you are determined to be of sound mind and not influenced by anyone, then let them make the decision. You will have many arguments against it (religion, could be cured unexpectedly) but it’s the patient’s decision.
The only argument would be if doctors and nurses should assist. This is a huge argument against state sponsored executions. Maybe a device that can safely and painlessly assist the patient could be a resolution.
So what you are saying is that we need some of those suicide booths that they had in Futarama.
You bring up a good point that it would be hard to find many doctors or medical professionals willing to focus their careers on euthanasia, as it goes against their oaths.
The “oath” isn’t legally binding. They should help those that are suffering no matter the expected end result.
The “Oath” isn’t why they can’t go around assisting in suicides. It’s because they will literally go to jail in the same way as a murderer
Are you not old enough to remember Jack Kevorkian?
I would love a Futurama world.
I’m in agreement. My concern is that this gives people in control the ability to feign choice. “They wanted this route” when in reality, it was murder.
Just need some decent protections in place for things like these.
I agree, it needs to be a very strict and regulated process. No power of attorney or anything like that. The person needs to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by two or three psychiatrist that specializes in suicidal thoughts or self harm. It needs to be a somewhat long process. But, I don’t want it to be a multi year process either.
In Canada, 2 doctors have to agree that the patient is of sound mind, wants Medical Assistance in Dying, and their condition meets the minimum legal threshold. I think that system has been working fairly well.
Sounds good…but in america…we’re prone to finding ways to fuck up.
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“Off yourself by X date and your designated beneficiary will receive a payout equal to 5% of the expected healthcare costs of managing your condition until your inevitable agonizing death! Act now and we’ll throw in an additional funeral package at no cost!”
I don’t know about the funeral package. Those things are expensive and you’re talking about insurance companies.
Hey I didn’t say it was even a decent package!
“Thanks for calling Joe’s Crematorium, you kill 'em, we torch 'em, what can I do for you?”
Burn it. Burn it all.
This is the largest reason why it has to remain illegal. Capitalism will find a way to make it marketable.
Death with dignity should be allowed and viewed with reverence.
All death is undignified. It’s the loss of the most precious thing we have. Only atheists view it as a cessation of being.
I disagree. Plenty of humans have lived wonderful lives. Death is inevitable. No reason why it can’t be managed as well as their life.
If anything, you’d think Atheists would value life more considering under that paradigm life is a finite resource that can and will run out.
I’m an atheist and I certainly value life more. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so that’s all you get.
But I also think that death can be very dignified. What can be very undignified is dying, especially if it is in a very agonizing way.
And that is why I support legal euthanasia. Forcing people to suffer something unbearable that is impossible to escape as long as they are alive is cruel.
Good old scarcity.
Yeah almost like an afterlife is a made up idea to convince people to be chill with dying in war
That being said, there are experiences no one really needs to go through. There’s no point to feeling the agonizing pain of end stage cancers. There’s no point to feeling calcium deposits or liver failure. If someone wants to skip those things and cut off a few months of suffering, I don’t blame them.
All the jabronis in this thread with “being able to decide when you die is BAD actually” have clearly never had a loved one painfully and slowly waste away in a shitty hospital bed praying for death every day.
People should have the right to decide when they decide to end the game of life. They should be able to make this decision with a qualified medical professional, preferably one who specializes in end of life care.
There are certain moments no one should have to endure. Really recommend the documentary “How to Die in Oregon.”
I work as an EEG tech. I see some really awful cases where there’s no hope for a meaningful recovery. Lawmakers should be required to do a month of hospice/palliative care rounds before signing any legislation on right to die. There is so much misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding what that care entails. The patients I see often don’t have the ability to make that choice and are left up on life preserving care for days to months at a time without any chance at meaningful recovery.
Forcing lawmakers to research a topic before deciding on it? This is America dammit! We don’t even make them READ the bills before deciding on them!
It should also be noted that these decisions primarily affect people who are too poor to afford to travel with their loved ones to places that currently allow assisted suicide. If you’re wealthy you are able to die how you want.
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But what about the pharmaceutical company shareholders? Don’t they get any say in how long we need their products? Yes one person might be in terrible pain for years, but at least twelve people will make a lot of money.
Making suicide profitable surely won’t have any kind of twisted dystopian effects on companies…
With how much they can charge for every individual comfort, suicide will never be more profitable than suffering. It it was, we wouldn’t be having these debates.
It doesn’t have to be the most profitable in all scenarios to be an optimization aspect of business to cheapen services and increase fees. Long-term care has long-term costs, if it is cheaper to push somebody to suicide, there will be economical vectors that seek to exploit the opening for profit.
I remember when this was a ballot initiative in CO.
I voted for it, but it was shocking to see just how much negativity there was surrounding it.
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No, it’s still on live support…
I shouldn’t need a reason.
This is not so much about giving you a reason than giving a doctor the legal option to assist you.
I understand. And, that doctor shouldn’t be able to deny my request.
Futurama suicide booths?
Futurama was parodying Star Trek, which came up with the idea.
Well, yes and no. I don’t want to be hacked to death inside an outhouse by a machine. But… maybe some kind of sleepy time tea and goooooogniiight.
I think Kovorkian has the right idea, honestly.
I’m permanently disabled with a degenerative condition. Once I’m just surviving and not living, I’d love the freedom of a painless end. I watched grandparents suffer, I’ve watched them be kept alive through machines and drugs, I listened to my grandfather beg me for death… you’ll never change my mind that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is the ethical choice.
Eh, I used to be all in favor of Right To Death laws, but when Canada passed theirs they started pushing the disabled and impoverished onto it, not just the terminally ill. Which is basically ethnic cleansing.
So while I understand the Slippery Slope argument is not a good one, I’m going to need to see some common sense restrictions before I could support this as fervently as I did before
What the hell are you talking about?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws
This is the only thing I can think they might be talking about?
That is what I’m talking about, they also made a commercial advocating suicide that was quietly pulled from YouTube when it pissed everyone off.
Both cases were people with MCR. You are simplifying things. The article makes things more clear.
Both? There were more than two cases, and for one of them they were just hard of hearing, hardly a reason to die.
It’s a common problem in Canada, people being forced onto the death list because they’re poor and the hospitals wanna “Free up some beds”
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