Rational Suicide- Part 3
A Consideration of End-Of-Life
Concerns
We Are All Going To Die
“How” Should Be Our Choice
The Last Six Stages to Death
Ageing= Love,
independence, Pain, Dignity, DNR, Faith
The Canadian
Medical Association has finally begun to realize that they are going to be hit
with an overload of Dying Old Farts in the near future. They have been engaged
in a series of Town Hall Forums across Canada in partnership with MACLEANS
magazine to gather and assess the facts about End-Of-Life treatment in order to
handle and devise a plan to deal with the problem. Unfortunately only the
readers of MACLEANS were aware that they were all televised and could have been
watched online. To this point there have been 4 meetings and MACLEANS
fortunately has recorded all of them and they can be seen at the link referenced
at the conclusion of this post.
1. Feb 20- St.John’s, NL
2. March 24- Vancouver, BC
3. April 16- Whitehorse, YT
4. May 7- Regina, SK
They
present a stellar group of expert caretakers that have been gathered from
nearly all aspects of Terminal Patient Care: Physicians, Nurses, Social
workers, Hospital staff, Hospice manager, Nursing home and assisted living
volunteers and others.
They are
missing the fact it is doubtful the resources they are counting on will be
available in time to handle the problem. In my opinion it didn’t matter which
profession addressed the panel none of them mentioned the possibility that the
growth of resources could not match the need for end-of life-care that will
develop in the next thirty years because of the Bloomer Blooming that is now
underway. There is no consideration in their planning for any of the threats
faced by global warming reducing resources essential to support the demands of
the global population. They all blithely assume that when the need arises all
the facilities needed to care for our seniors will be available and paid for by
somebody else. That quite simply is not going to happen.
With the
current availability of resources; the growth of services required will never
be met! They are too many. The cost of servicing them to support an aging
population of the size anticipated is going to increase exponentially because
aging requires changing residences to accommodate the differing stages we
encounter with aging.
Simple
examples are moving to a planned retirement home and then losing your ability
to maintain the place and moving to an assisted living facility. Then you lose
your mobility and here comes the wheelchair crowd at the old fogy’s joint and
then inability to care for your personal needs and then back to the hospital
and the doctors who will make your exit in a cloud of pain killers to handle
surgery, radiation, and the horrible agony of chemotherapy side effects.
There are
all kinds of needs and endings but the two most horrible in my mind are losing
myself to Alzheimer’s, or worst of all; losing my ability to communicate and
control my care then be confined to a hospital bed for as long as my personal
service immigrant minimum wage girl can keep me alive. Isolation inside your
own head, three tasteless feedings of hospital crap that you can then shit out
and lie in until girlie comes to wipe your arse does not qualify as a
“dignified death”.
Rational
suicide is simply the right to get a “dignified death”, when I want one but
that is another fight.
Getting
back to the CMA, listen carefully to the hair splitting they do when they consider
all the ways that ending a life can be done but do not qualify as “Physician
Assisted” suicide.
If you
watch one of these m,ake sure you watch the opening of the series at St. Johns
Fe 2, 2014. That is ½ hour and effectively is the first half hour of the
following three.
I will end
this post now and ask you to watch some of the middle and end discussions in
the series and make up your own mind whether they are just navel gazing and
ignoring external reality re resources availability.
Please
check this link out and I will be back with a following post to justify the
inclusion of Rational Suicide as an alternative in the End-of-Life discussion.
Until later
Blaine Barrett
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