261–270 of 337 posts
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That's your opinion. No matter how absolute you phrase it, it's not a fact. And I've seen enough suffering and death to know that not everybody shares your opinion. I've seen people who, when they were healthy, held opinions just like yours beg for death when their time had come. Count your blessings that you've not known pain, fear, or panic like the dying do.
It's not my opinion, it's objective fact; after death there is literally nothingness forever, and even excruciating pain is something; you can react to it, decide things about it, etc. Those are facts . Also you know absolutely nothing about me. Don't pretend like you do.
^^ That's an opinion, phrased as if it was a fact. It's a value judgement and nothing more. I respect that it's your opinion, but just because you fervently believe it doesn't make it objectively true.
If you wish to engage in a meaningful and productive conversation, you'll need to be more honest about separating your opinions from fact. I think that, underneath all the shouting, you have a very interesting take on the issue. I'd like to discuss it. But it's drowned out by your inability to recognize that other people can have a different -- and equally valid -- interpretation of what "quality of life" means.
(Also, no: You cannot "decide things" about excruciating pain. It takes over a person's ability to reason. Chronic, debilitating pain very much robs a person of their agency.)
On the topic of describing the events of the code (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) in great detail, there have been studies showing that bringing the family into the room during a code leads to decreased PTSD for the family. From a study in the New England Journal of Medicine: "Conclusions: Family presence during CPR was associated with positive results on psychological variables and did not interfere with medical eff…
I was in the room when my dad coded. I watched everything. I saw them manually providing oxygen by "bagging" him. I answered questions about DNR. I watched them place eyedrops in to verify death. I walked with his body down to the morgue. I am thankful by the fact that I was there. But I am tormented by it too.
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I suppose I might choose the excruciating pain if I were alone on a desert island with nobody watching. But if my wife and children were sitting round my death bed I think I'd prefer, for their benefit, to die in a dignified way. And in a timely manner so as not to keep them waiting. Death is not eternal nothingness. Life goes on.
Death absolutely is an eternal nothingness, don't fool yourself. Your kids, your wife, none of that matters after you're dead. It's literally irrelevant at that point.
I want to go out as a result of a series of violent mistakes trying to save my life. Why would anyone want anything else? Peaceful death is basically suicide. Why do doctors continually perpetuate this notion that slipping softly into death (palliative care, hospice) is preferable to continually trying to avoid it by way of riskier and riskier attempts at treating the root cause? At the very least, we could be honest…
I 100% agree with you. Though everyone should be able to make their own decision and because people are diffrent they will come to diffrent conclusions about what the right path for them is. We should not be trying to impose our path on other people. That said I'm going to speculate that as a doctor being asked to do long series of futile actions while watching a person die has to be traumatic. So I can understand wh…
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Thanks, that makes more sense than the other answers. Strange to use a term like that in an article that is presumably for mass consumption.
Docility is a social network for psyicians, hardly a strange place to use medical terms.
My Dad had a cardiac arrest at 70. And consequently deprived of oxygen for 10+ minutes. My Mom did all she could with chest pumps waiting for paramedics. This kept him alive so he made it to hospital. When I saw my Dad, a few hours later, his eyes were glazed over, pupils dilated, unable to make sort of recognizable sound, just soft nightmarish screams, and stretching out his arms like he wanted to get away. I though…
This may have been misunderstood by the author. The patient's loved one may have asked that question in a more general context, to achieve some form of closure. And the answer to this, truthfully, would have been that, yes, they did everything they could - especially in the early stages of the disease when there was still hope of minimizing the damage and/or alleviate suffering.
I understand the young doctor's judgement that the patient's loved one was partially to blame for the needless extension of the patient's suffering. It's a hard call to make, and people don't want to be the one who let a loved person go. They're afraid that they'll always be asking themselves the question whether they should really have given up on that person. That's why it's better to have the patient set the policy while they're still able to make that decision, precisely to not put relatives into that position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in the room when my dad coded. I watched everything. I saw them manually providing oxygen by "bagging" him. I answered questions about DNR. I watched them place eyedrops in to verify death. I walked with his body down to the morgue. I am thankful by the fact that I was there. But I am tormented by it too.
The first time I saw the death of someone close to me, I was tormented, too, by my own sense of the fragility of life. But especially my own life. I was afraid for myself, and tormented by the certitude of my own terminal existence, the fear amplified by the urgency of my circumstances and especially after witnessing (or participating in) the subsequent deaths of yet more close friends. But after some years of therap…
(1) An increasing, intentional aversion to one's own death and the death of others. Instead of living life in full awareness that you and those you care about are all dying (in some sense), our culture runs from the prospect of death through various forms of distraction, etc. This adolescent attitude weirdly breeds a callousness of heart. If death isn't something you ever think about, then does it really have meaning? If you always evade the fear instead of confronting it head-on, then there is no real loss or pain or grief. There is less joy precisely because of this evasion, but at least you've numbed yourself, right?
(2) The second irony is that even though this culture runs from the thought of death, it is also increasingly a culture of death in some regards. A culture of death is one where individual and collective actions that typically lead to the de-stabilization, weakening, or implosion of the society which celebrates them... are celebrated. This can be seen across the West, regardless of one's ideological slant. Cultural/societal death and decay remain invariant across ideological groups (that is, they have no privileged locus).