I'm sure when you're in the medical field for a while, it's impossible not to think of people as meat, but it is frustrating to be judged for making difference choices.
My mother, over the past few years, has been going through the consequences of being a lifelong smoker. She has had cancer, aneurysms, a heart attack, and multiple breathing crises resulting in trips to the emergency room and weeks in the hospital. She has survived all of this, despite the doctors' predictions and in some cases best efforts to facilitate those predictions. They see an elderly woman with multiple terminal illnesses in pain, so they give her morphine, it depresses her breathing and causes hallucinations, and she looks and acts the picture of someone who's not going to make it to next week. That happened a year ago and my sister figured out that she was being overmedicated, and a short time after stopping the end-of-life treatment, she was able to go back home. Eventually she got enrolled in Hospice, which at first meant access to some equipment and a bit of "help", but before long they brought the morphine into the house to deal with some back pain, the amount escalated, and she ended up back in the hospital where she stopped eating, got an untreatable bowel obstruction, and rapidly lost a ton of weight. She wasn't actively being treated for anything, and all of our interactions with the doctors and hospice people were about ensuring there would be no life-saving interventions, so we questioned the point of being in the hospital. Once again, off the morphine she came back to life and went home. She didn't want to die. We have had years of decent quality time together that would not have happened if we hadn't taken an active role in preventing her from being prematurely shoved down the "old person dying" chute.
I am a huge fan of modern medical science. It saved my mother's life and the lives of many people I know. At the same time, people are human and do human things. Not everyone values the same things. My sister and I found it very upsetting to be constantly judged for wanting to do anything other than medicate my Mom to death, and as it my be obvious from my tone, I'm holding a grudge. I feel compassion for the author of this article for the trauma they had and have to experience, but I do not respect them for it is obvious they don't respect the family with the judgmental and holier-than-thou attitude.