A heart wrenching article from the Boston Globe today.
The article was titled – Who decides when you die?
…recount how an 83-year-old woman who had survived melanoma for more than seven years arrived in the hospital’s intensive care unit with an array of other ailments including kidney failure. The woman, speaking with great clarity, told her doctors she wanted no more treatment.
The doctors, following usual protocol, arranged a bedside family meeting to discuss treatment options and to explain that her chances of living more than a year were slim. The woman’s husband, son, and daughter (who was her designated healthcare proxy) then asked for privacy. Doctors left the room, and 45 minutes later her son emerged to tell them they should “do everything possible” to save his mother. Later, doctors learned that she had set aside her wishes in order to please her son.
The woman went on to receive chemotherapy and implantation of a dialysis catheter, but died within three months of leaving the intensive care unit. She never returned home…
While this strays from my normal discourse of that which can cure death, the story discussed within the article raises many issues about the right to death. It provides further information about how little prepared most are for the very end. Why is that? Is it perhaps that the urge to live is in all of us, even those facing terminal issues? Or are we just unwilling to face inevitability since we have been told always that death is that which waits for us?
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