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What my mother didn’t talk about (2020)
- danneezhao 1y agoEnd-of-life care is a profoundly complex topic. Every individual deserves respect, even as they approach the end of their life. Yet factors ranging from legal and ethical considerations to human relationships and emotions mean that, even today, there is no definitive answer.
- JKCalhoun 1y agohttps://archive.ph/BI6Cl https://archive.ph/BI6Cl (The original link broke with my ad-blockers turned on, the archive though is missing one photo from the original article.) A very powerful read. I lost my mother two years ago and this resonates. Just realized I read one of the author's books, "How to Get into the Twin Palms".
- EUSSR 1y ago[flagged]
- comrade1234 1y agoSimilar to when my mother died of cancer while I was in high school but one big difference was how rational and aware the mother in this story was compared to my mother on her last night and day while undergoing hallucinations from the incredible pain she was experiencing. There were moments where she would recognize you and grip your hand and then she would be lost and rambling and saying nonsense and completely separate from us in another world until finally she took her last breath. This was at-home hospice. Very different than when my father died of ALS a few decades later and the nurses were knowingly and purposefully giving him morphine so that he could suffocate in peace as his diaphragm stopped working but at the same time they slowly killed him with the morphine stopping his breathing, thankfully.
- pirate787 1y agoIts funny we don't have "legal" euthanasia but hospice stopping feeding and fluids, or overdosing painkillers, is a more horrible form of it.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 1y agoFor the record, having suffered the effects of extreme dehydration before, if someone insists on aiding me in the process of dying (against my wishes) please get it over with quickly. End it with the morphine right off. Dehydration is a miserable process; the immediate misery of thirst aside, the delirium, paranoia, and irritability are not the least bit merciful to inflict on someone, in my personal experience.
- Swizec 1y agoWe do have ~~legal euthanasia~~ assisted suicide! Several countries and even some US states have some form of it! Just not widely advertised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide_in_the_United...
- xyzzy123 1y agoI think what OP might have been getting at is that in reality _every_ western country has assisted dying (the nurse will OD the patient on painkillers at a certain point), it's just not legally acknowledged everywhere or widely understood unless you have actually witnessed the end of life process.
- hobs 1y agoIts not everywhere and its very sporadic, but there's many angels of mercy out there. We should not have to make nurses make the choice.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> We should not have to make nurses make the choice. The nurse shouldn't be making the choice. That responsibility belongs to the family. The family is likely to hate having to make the choice even more than the nurse does. Does this have any implications?
- tejohnso 1y ago> at the same time they slowly killed him with the morphine stopping his breathing, thankfully. Yeah, some places have two forms of assisted death available. Fast assisted death, or slow assisted death. Either way, you're getting medical assistance through the dying process. Not sure why some people feel like slow assisted death should be the only option.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago> Not sure why some people feel like slow assisted death should be the only option. To reduce potential for abuse, obviously. I wouldn't trust the average doctor with proper antibiotic dosing, much less a literal killswitch.
- amelius 1y agoMaybe a stupid thought but why not give the patient a knob to adjust the dose?
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoIt's not that hard to kill yourself actually. "Assisted suicide" is for the grey area of mentally/physically incapable people.
- seventhtiger 1y agoFor the same reason I'm against capital punishment. I don't trust the state with the due dilegence to have direct power over life and death. What happens when care is available but insurance figures assisted death is cheaper? The fact that someone could look at the healthcare system and say "give them the option to kill people" is wild. You can say whatever you want about criteria and process, then I want you to think of the million ways things go wrong when lofty goals are transformed into bureaucracy.
- tejohnso 1y ago> I don't trust the state with the due dilegence Me neither. That's why I'm glad that in any jurisdiction I've seen it available, it always comes down to the patient's choice. > I want you to think of the million ways things go wrong Nothing is perfect but if someone is suffering months or potentially years of pain I'm glad that they have the option to choose to end it legally. > The fact that someone could look at the healthcare system and say "give them the option to kill people" is wild. Nobody says that, maybe that's why it seems so wild. It's the patient that has the option, not the system. "Give patients the choice of end of life treatment that they prefer" is more like it. > due dilegence to have direct power over life and death How do you feel about police carrying firearms with authority to kill base on high pressure, low time, individual decision making?
- ethan_smith 1y agoThe morphine wasn't killing him - at proper palliative doses it relieves suffering while the underlying disease causes death, a crucial ethical and medical distinction in end-of-life care.
- cpfohl 1y agoThe Dr who treated my brother while he was dying explained this really well; the reduced pain can actually extend life (on the order of minutes) because the reduced discomfort/pain allowed him to continue breathing longer than he would have otherwise.
- lynx97 1y agoI can't talk about the specific case mentioned here, but... Morphines are indeed used in palliative medicine to unofficially end the suffering. This is a fact that is not talked about much, because it is highly illegal. I had a chat with a palliative doctor just 2 years ago, and she confirmed this to me. At some point, they decide it is finally enough, and overdose. IMO, a very humane approach. I hereby thank everyone involved in such things for taking the risk to shorten the final days of a dying person, to avoid unnecessary pain. I can only hope, when my time comes, that some angel around me will do the same for me.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 1y agoIf that's in line with the patient's wishes, cool. Otherwise, not so cool, both for the act of killing someone and for undermining the arguments in favor of legal euthanasia.
- newsclues 1y agoUnofficial MAID.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoMedical Assistance In Dying, for the curious
- Kim_Bruning 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bbstats 1y agoJust read it
- weinzierl 1y agoIf you wondered too which condition her mother had I can spare you the read (or the copy paste in your favorite LLM). The condition is never named in the article.
- nick__m 1y agoI am pretty sure it's metastatic lung cancer. The clues are various mention of lungs and the stage 4 in the beginning of the article. [I was wrong it was breast cancer]
- js2 1y agoBreast cancer. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nhregister/name/krystyna-waclawiak-obituary?id=8948869 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nhregister/name/krystyn...
- netsharc 1y agoThe internet has her death announcement, if you DDG it. All the information is on the task.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- huhkerrf 1y agoIf you think the piece is to divulge which condition her mother had (which, to be frank, was pretty obvious from reading the context clues), you missed the point.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThe opening is "I looked in her emails to find whether she lied", but it then goes into the entire life story of the author and their mother type of article, which... I just don't have the time for or interest in. More of a vacation "Reader's Digest" type story.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Animats 1y agoThe site has a long scrolling thing which presents a box called "Continue". If clicked on, that yields a popup that says "Checking compatibility" and then loads some page called "Manuals Explorer", which then tries to install a browser extension. The hostile code seems to come from "html-load.com". Suggest avoiding "buzzfeednews.com" for hosting hostile code.
- aredox 1y agoGood news is that Firefox + Ublock Origin worked perfectly to avoid all this without any specific or extra setup from stock.
- kazinator 1y agoDates are not given in the article, and a bit of a puzzle. Karolina's mother died in 2019. This was supposedly 28 years after being diagnosed, which brings us to 1991. And that was when Karolina was 12. (Her DOB is defying attempts at uncovery.) They supposedly fled Poland around ten years before communism fell, according to a remark in the story, so maybe 1980. But Karolina would have to have been an infant; she wouldn't remember anything about Poland, let alone a camp in Treiskirchen, Austria. Her mom remarked during their visit to the camp, "You chased a boy for bread. [...] You were always hungry.” So at least a toddler, perhaps as as old as 3 or 4? Maybe they left Poland more toward the mid 1980's; not ten years before communism fell.