From "She Didn’t Want to Live With Advanced Dementia. So Why Was She Being Kept Alive? Some consider the regular feeding of late-stage dementia patients to be nonnegotiable. Others see it as extending life unnecessarily" (NYT).
The article cites a paper that presents the idea of minimal comfort feeding: "The nursing staff could provide small quantities of food and liquid if the patient signaled she wanted it, enough to keep her comfortable while still allowing her to die."
From the comments over there: "Minimal comfort feeding was the human and humane default for millennia. It’s the medical system that messed this one up, forcing three meals every day primarily so they can create a paper trail. Blessings to families who accept that their loved one is dying and believe the closed mouth, shaking head, and pulling away just as much as they believe the desire for a milkshake." (The milkshake refers to something in the article: "Some days, she clenched her jaw tight. But that wasn’t always true. One day, her husband stopped by with a milkshake. 'For whatever reason, she wanted that milkshake,' Ms. Hendrickson said, 'So we’re like, ‘OK, have at it.'")
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27 comments:
After three miserable years in a nursing home due to a stroke, my mother refused her meds, food, and drink, and was gone in three days. She wasn't mentally incapacitated, and decided she'd had enough. I don't fault her even a little bit.
In my very anecdotal experience (mum and uncle), people who are close to death stop wanting food. If you're still hungry or at least bored enough to want to eat, then maybe perhaps you aren't quite dying? CC, JSM
"Limiting food and water has been used to hasten death in people dying at home since long before it had a formal name." This happened with two of my older relatives when they were in end-of-life home hospice care. It became difficult for them to eat or drink on their own, but they weren't given intravenous fluids. It seemed ghastly -- like they were dying too slowly, so the pace needed to be accelerated for some reason. Letting someone die through starvation and dehydration seems something akin to torture -- I still can't understand why the hospice companies think it's the most humane thing to do.
To deny a person food and water is immoral. No matter how it's spun.
Refusing to feed or give drink to someone, a human being, who wants and asks for food and drink is contemptible and inhumane. As is force feeding someone who does not wish to eat or drink. Seems simple enough, except, I suppose, for "intellectuals."
Planned Personhood (PP). Relieve your "burden". Why wait?
You can always rationalize getting rid of the inconvenient. This is just one more example.
I don't appreciate your insituation that his handlers should stop feeding Donald J Trump double cheeseburgers and Diet Coke. Thankfully, despite the wishes and actions of the lunitac left, our blessed leader is thriving!
While I can see someone specifying they don't want to be feed intravenous or by gastric tube if unresponsive, I'm more than a bit skeptical that people actually agreed to have food withheld if they are still conscious. Refusing is another matter entirely. As Goldenpause suggests this seems like somebody making an extreme interpretation of generalized instructions.
As some who has suffered abuse, the worst part is the first time - the first betrayal, the first beatdown, the first molestation, the first rape. More of the same is obviously horrible and shouldn't be dismissed, but Innocence can only be destroyed once. Then the light in your eyes goes out. Forever.
Dementia is an exception. The mind has reset. So you're abusing someone for the first time, over and over and over again. That's especially cruel and deserving of the most inhumane punishment we dare to imagine.
"Others see it as extending life unnecessarily"
Andere sehen es als unnötige Verlängerung des Lebens.
FIFY. Dish is best served in the original German.
"As is force feeding someone who does not wish to eat or drink"
Justice for those tricked into eating a spoonful of mushy peas when they were promised a spoonful for ice cream.
"Blessings to families who accept that their loved one is dying" But many people with severe dementia/Alzheimers are not "dying," at least no more than the rest of us who are always dying anyway.
Withholding nourishment from someone who is dying is called 'killing them'. What monster would try to obfuscate this with sophistry and misdirection, like calling it 'uncomfortable territory ?? If a patient asks for food, you give them food, whether they are demented or not.
I kept on feeding my severely Alzheimered wife until she became unresponsive. While of sound mind she had specified that she not be intubated when that happened. Her natural death came as a relief to me, and possibly to her.
I condemn it only for hypocrisy. It’s a kind persons way of being unkind, but causing death some other way is too active to be acceptable, no ice flows. It is a human trial that exhausts those who love the dying.
I don't remember, but I am told I loved eating and laughing when I was 8 months. Pain issues aside, I expect I will be the same if I am 98 years.
Starving those with dementia? Last time I checked, Biden is still getting his ice cream cones.
"is uncomfortable territory for many"
I think that, "uncomfortable," is too mild a word here. We're, literally, talking about life and death decisions. The fact that someone had to die so that I could have a transplant haunts me in a horrible way. I'm not talking about the donor; I'm talking about the person who didn't get a transplant because I did.
Mom watched her Mom linger in a Nursing Home after several severe strokes, and Mom vowed that would never happen to her. To achieve this, when she had her strokes, we had clear instructions to let her die at home, and she did that after many many days. Mostly comfortable I think (who can know for sure, and I wasn't there), but she ate nothing and drank very little. I still have mixed feelings about this.
Ah yes, hunger and/or thirst are not painful at all! People will justify anything if it makes them feel better. (But yes, sometimes it can be the best choice of many hard and painful choices. But let's not pretend it's inherently humane.)
"seems like somebody making an extreme interpretation of generalized instructions."
The American right-wing is so Damned. And it's not because we turn away from the poor, the sick, single moms, starving children. If only that was our Sin, we could find our way back.
Scouting is the perfect example. Parents were "too busy" to volunteer for leadership positions, "just outsource it like everything else". Well guess who self-selects to be around children? Predators. A hard learned lesson, I guess. Because while conservatives are remarkable at preserving lessons learned so future generations won't repeat the same damn mistakes, it doesn't occur to them that THEY might be that future generation. You can be sure that if there's ever a Marxist takeover, it will be well-documented with all the inflection points identified so someone else could have done something to stop it. Poor Solzhenitsyn, was it really all for nothing?
Taken forward, it should have occurred to someone (myself included) that the Left didn't sweep into the void we left behind just to register dependent voters and virtue signal about what Righteous Dudes they surely must be. Oh no, as we are seeing in MN, it was to rip off the helpless. People who are already disadvantaged were further victimized. For the simple reason that predators prefer to prey on the weak. Where were we? Sure, the taxpayers got screwed, but what about the poor SOB who's second chance at Life was stolen from him?
I know charity from the Right is an unsung hero, as all true virtues should be. But it's not enough. YOU IN THE BACK - I SEE YOU, stop looking around for the false equivalence, stop aspiring to be the "lesser evil". You aren't being judged in relation to the sins of the Left - they don't have souls, they aren't even on the table as an appetizer.
TLDR. We simply can't abandon the weak, the sick, the helpless to be exploited by the Left. And the solution won't come from scribal monks, we need the ones who haven't forgotten how to swing a mace. Unfortunately, this particular injustice only exists in the first place because it took advantage of our Achilles Heel - we just want to be left alone. We want smaller government, but we leave the ruling details to self-selected Control Freaks attracted to Power and figure it will all work out okay in the end, right? Same thing as the Scouts, same as the Minnesota welfare fraud. Same stupid pattern, repeating. And conservatism should impart some immunity to this. So why are we failing?
Whatever. I've been betrayed by my own people (thank you for your service is a lie, right Glenn?) so why bother alarming them. Instead, how about some insider advice for their enemies, for the Left: you guys appear to have missed this, too caught up in Handmaiden's Cosplay to notice perhaps, but THE RIGHT IS ONLY UNIFIED BY YOUR HATRED OF THEM. If you could manage to leave them alone for a few years, they would disperse and wander off to pursue family and fortune. You could just walk in and seize power. Utgard-Loki (waves to Dad) has invoked the Law of Irony. For you, it means the people with all the guns and ammo can be taken down without a shot being fired. All I ask for in return is a seat on the Guillotine Committee. I have some marvelous decorating ideas, you'll see.
[and yes, I see my hypocrisy. Though I never claimed to be righteous. I only know which path is true because I've tried all the wrong ones. It's the long way home but it still gets you there]
This is the current Iran strategery
EastEnders is having a story arc right now in which a longtime character (Nigel, if you know the show) just died from Alzheimer's. He went into an NHS hospice (I know, it's fiction) and just died off - first slowly, then quickly. There were no tubes or IV's. All seemed very nice. I suppose it's the BBC doing its bit to support this policy. CC, JSM
When i was twenty I never wanted to be this age. However, I was a knucklehead when I was 20. People say they wouldn't want to live if they became paralysed from the waist down and then go on to play wheelchair basketball. We can endure a lot and even thrive.
Had a co-worker whose mother was 90. Got to the point where she couldn't walk and had arthritis, etc. And she just said "I want to die" and refused to eat. Dead in a week.
Another story - this one a relative. She had a heart problem. She just stopped taking her meds, and drank wine and enjoyed her life. Died in her sleep at 84.
Lots of people just reach a point and say "that's enough, its not like i'm gonna live forever."
I've never had to deal directly with an old person with mental problems. I've visited nursing homes with people with alzheimers and its really quite sad to see them shuffling around like zombies. Physically they look great, but their minds a blank.
Advanced permission for withholding feeding of dementia patients wouldn't ever work for the likes of personalities like that of TheDonald. He could never permit the withholding of his daily dosages of MacDonald hamburgers and Diet Coke.
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