Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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I was there when my mother woke from her brief coma and reaffirmed her decision to cease life support.
I'm glad she got to see the people that love her, and that we weren't in the position of having to state the decision relayed to us without having her awake to be clear that she hadn't changed her mind. At the same time, it obviously also tears at my heart that she had to experience the additional suffering of returning to a lucid state to face death, rather than simply not waking up again. From a strictly egoistical point of view, I would of course want to still have her around, as any child would want. But for her own sake, I'm glad she had some choice in the matter of when and how, that she could die as herself, and didn't have to suffer further.
She had progressed to multiple organ failure from the sepsis, and the leukemia had progressed to the point where the pressure of the dividing cells in her marrow was cracking her skeleton open. For her to have a chance to live, heroic measures would have to be undertaken, with intensive antibiotics, complete bone marrow eradication, organ transplants, extensive surgery and so forth. In any real sense, on the off chance that she did survive in a physical sense, she would not have survived as the person she was. And to boot, she would have had to live with dialysis and go off the medications for depression, general anxiety and panic anxiety.
It was difficult to sit with her from when the machines were turned off until, at 2:40pm on 29/9-08, they pronounced her dead.
But I'm glad she didn't have to endure even more and- crucially- that she had a choice.
There are several complications with extending the current options to include euthanasia, but they are tractable problems. What I do not trust, however, is that politicians and legislators will do a good job of it, or that hospital managements will adequately put the patients' concerns ahead of their own, or that doctors are going to universally adhere to the safeguards that necessarily must be in place to prevent this beneficial and merciful arrangement from changing into a vehicle for murder. No number of true mercy killings can adequately make up for even a single murder. And one must also be wary of utilitarianism. Until such time as we have a system that is ready to act with capability and maturity, it is hard to conceive of a scenario where an adequate solution is put into place.
Consider that it is seen as radical that Mexico used an improvement centric methodology to clean up its health care sector (!).
What that translates into, is as simple as deploying two or more versions of a solution, evaluating them to determine which worked best, doing more of what worked and less of what didn't, and then repeating this process across all the variables in several iterations. A process that should be familiar to anyone that ever did cooking without a recipe: you try your educated guesses, see what works and what doesn't, then adjust it until you're happy with the results. In a field with objective metrics of success, this should be the obvious method, and the first thing to be tried. Instead, it seems there isn't a single government (well, except Finland) that does it with any consistency. The preferred "methodology" worldwide remains to pull an idea out of one's ass, disregard prior work and facts, then declare it a success without looking back.
That standard is inadequate to any task, and most certainly inadequate to this task.
Heck, most politicians and beurocrats have never read Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress, which should (for the time being) constitute sufficient grounds to ban someone from holding any office that involves deliverables, management, personell or politics until such time as they can restate the contents in three different and equivalent wordings after a literal recitation. The rest of the offices can then be cut, seeing as they will be back in short order anyway (beurocracies grow by a fixed rate, regardless of the amount of work to be done at any given point, if there even is any to do).
I want people to own themselves, legally speaking, and I'm not certain we can get that at present.
Yet another stopgap measure to fix one thing in the patchwork won't improve things long term.
The goal doesn't seem very controversial, but good intentions pave new roads every day.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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This just breaks my heart... - 
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