Similar 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Amen my friend. I don't think the people who make these kinds of laws have spent anywhere near enough time talking to people who are dying and suffering from extreme pain. I wrote a research paper in college about the subject and felt pretty agnostic about it (i.e. there were interesting arguments with merit on both sides) until watching my grandparents and many relatives and friends over the years die from cancer and other painful things. I am no longer agnostic on it. I think somebody making or supporting these types of laws are actively advocating for torture.
If 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.
Not all who get this help are equal. If you argued loudly that humans must suffer for religious reasons , you may get to suffer for obvious reasons by the medical personal refusing to touch your case. Kharma is a beach, all things flow back and forth, the suffering yoz caused, it comes back to you in your final moments .
The 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.
> 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.
For 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.
I think you viewpoint is very reasonable. There is way too little focus on 'how can this be missused' and 'what are the incentives'. More often than not the critique is hand waived away with some hard on crime tough talk.
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?
Assisted death is sometimes used by people who don't have a terminal illness. And there's the worry that insurance is more likely to deny treatment coverage now that a cheaper alternative (assisted death) is available.
>The nonprofit organization Inclusion Canada regularly hears from people with disabilities who are offered euthanasia, including one disabled woman whose physiotherapist suggested it when she sought help for a bruised hip, said executive vice president Krista Carr.
>“Our response to the intolerable suffering of people with disabilities is: ‘Your life is not worth living,'” she said. “We’ll just offer them the lethal injection, and we’ll offer it readily.”
Do you think insurance companies are not already doing that, just without the fast way out for the patients, so they are left to live in pain? The current reality of not paying for the assisted suicide is cheaper than the potential of paying for it; how much would it really change behavior?
>Do you think insurance companies are not already doing that, just without the fast way out for the patients, so they are left to live in pain?
Just because something bad is already happening doesn't mean it's ok to do something that will make it happen more frequently.
Not to mention the many people who will get assisted suicide who don't have coverage denied, and/or don't have a terminal illness, potentially due to encouragement/coercion from doctors, nurses, family, insurance, etc.
>The current reality of not paying for the assisted suicide is cheaper than the potential of paying for it; how much would it really change behavior?
Now the insurance companies have something cheap to offer. So it gives them an excuse not to offer something better.
Seems like you are opposed to it because it will end up being used solely because it will be the cheaper option. So just make it not the cheaper option. Allow it, but make it expensive so the insurance companies don’t consider it before other treatments.
So put a giant tax on it? That is an interesting idea. I'm pretty sure the people who say it's a right will fight that.
And there's also the question of how big the tax should be. Someone with an illness that requires expensive treatment but is expected to not die for a long time might cost the insurance company millions in treatment. Would that tax be millions?
One problem would be in the case of government-run healthcare, or government-run insurance. In that case, to what extent would the tax just be taking money out of one of the government's pockets and putting it in the other? I'm not sure that would disincentive it.
In fact, some doctors, nurses, might consider it good to help fund the government, and thus it might almost be an incentive for them to do it.
Indeed, and insurance is already highly regulated. It doesn't seem like it would be very hard to basically say, "you can't consider assisted suicide as an alternative option when making coverage decisions."
Will it still happen somewhat? Yeah probably, but there's also the very real suffering of a human being that needs to be considered. Telling them, "no sorry you have to have a painful and prolonged and undignified death because an insurance company might misuse the option if we give it to you" is pretty messed up IMHO
The taboo against suicide is necessary in order to maintain the taboo against suggesting other people kill themselves when they have become inconvenient to you, unfortunately. Like elderly relatives and difficult patients.
The difference is, is it pro-social or not? Not whether it's good for the individual. Charging enemy machine gun nests is pro-social behavior, arguably. Killing yourself because you're in constant pain is anti-social.
I'm just saying that social mores line up more with what is pro-social vs. anti-social, not what is good for the individual (which is more ambiguous anyway).
This is just a way of saying "is it good or not"? Pro-social is defined as "things I think are good", and anti-social is defined as "things I think are bad". Surely you agree that charging enemy American machine guns, if you're the Taliban, is antisocial.
I 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.
For 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.
I 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]
If 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.
The 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.
The 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.
Dates 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.
End-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.
Similar 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Amen my friend. I don't think the people who make these kinds of laws have spent anywhere near enough time talking to people who are dying and suffering from extreme pain. I wrote a research paper in college about the subject and felt pretty agnostic about it (i.e. there were interesting arguments with merit on both sides) until watching my grandparents and many relatives and friends over the years die from cancer and other painful things. I am no longer agnostic on it. I think somebody making or supporting these types of laws are actively advocating for torture.
If 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.
Not all who get this help are equal. If you argued loudly that humans must suffer for religious reasons , you may get to suffer for obvious reasons by the medical personal refusing to touch your case. Kharma is a beach, all things flow back and forth, the suffering yoz caused, it comes back to you in your final moments .
Unofficial MAID.
Medical Assistance In Dying, for the curious
Thank you, I forgot that Canada is ahead of much of the world on this
The 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.
A crucial distinction that is frequently not respected, for good reasons.
> 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.
For 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.
I think you viewpoint is very reasonable. There is way too little focus on 'how can this be missused' and 'what are the incentives'. More often than not the critique is hand waived away with some hard on crime tough talk.
> 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?
What happens when care is available but insurance decides you don't get it, and you die anyway?
Assisted death is sometimes used by people who don't have a terminal illness. And there's the worry that insurance is more likely to deny treatment coverage now that a cheaper alternative (assisted death) is available.
>The nonprofit organization Inclusion Canada regularly hears from people with disabilities who are offered euthanasia, including one disabled woman whose physiotherapist suggested it when she sought help for a bruised hip, said executive vice president Krista Carr.
>“Our response to the intolerable suffering of people with disabilities is: ‘Your life is not worth living,'” she said. “We’ll just offer them the lethal injection, and we’ll offer it readily.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/some-health-care-workers-...
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/09/16/should-e...
Do you think insurance companies are not already doing that, just without the fast way out for the patients, so they are left to live in pain? The current reality of not paying for the assisted suicide is cheaper than the potential of paying for it; how much would it really change behavior?
>Do you think insurance companies are not already doing that, just without the fast way out for the patients, so they are left to live in pain?
Just because something bad is already happening doesn't mean it's ok to do something that will make it happen more frequently.
Not to mention the many people who will get assisted suicide who don't have coverage denied, and/or don't have a terminal illness, potentially due to encouragement/coercion from doctors, nurses, family, insurance, etc.
>The current reality of not paying for the assisted suicide is cheaper than the potential of paying for it; how much would it really change behavior?
Now the insurance companies have something cheap to offer. So it gives them an excuse not to offer something better.
Seems like you are opposed to it because it will end up being used solely because it will be the cheaper option. So just make it not the cheaper option. Allow it, but make it expensive so the insurance companies don’t consider it before other treatments.
So put a giant tax on it? That is an interesting idea. I'm pretty sure the people who say it's a right will fight that.
And there's also the question of how big the tax should be. Someone with an illness that requires expensive treatment but is expected to not die for a long time might cost the insurance company millions in treatment. Would that tax be millions?
One problem would be in the case of government-run healthcare, or government-run insurance. In that case, to what extent would the tax just be taking money out of one of the government's pockets and putting it in the other? I'm not sure that would disincentive it.
In fact, some doctors, nurses, might consider it good to help fund the government, and thus it might almost be an incentive for them to do it.
Indeed, and insurance is already highly regulated. It doesn't seem like it would be very hard to basically say, "you can't consider assisted suicide as an alternative option when making coverage decisions."
Will it still happen somewhat? Yeah probably, but there's also the very real suffering of a human being that needs to be considered. Telling them, "no sorry you have to have a painful and prolonged and undignified death because an insurance company might misuse the option if we give it to you" is pretty messed up IMHO
The taboo against suicide is necessary in order to maintain the taboo against suggesting other people kill themselves when they have become inconvenient to you, unfortunately. Like elderly relatives and difficult patients.
And yet people are supposed to charge enemy machine gun nests for king and country.
The difference is, is it pro-social or not? Not whether it's good for the individual. Charging enemy machine gun nests is pro-social behavior, arguably. Killing yourself because you're in constant pain is anti-social.
I'm just saying that social mores line up more with what is pro-social vs. anti-social, not what is good for the individual (which is more ambiguous anyway).
This is just a way of saying "is it good or not"? Pro-social is defined as "things I think are good", and anti-social is defined as "things I think are bad". Surely you agree that charging enemy American machine guns, if you're the Taliban, is antisocial.
> 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.
Maybe a stupid thought but why not give the patient a knob to adjust the dose?
It's not that hard to kill yourself actually.
"Assisted suicide" is for the grey area of mentally/physically incapable people.
Its funny we don't have "legal" euthanasia but hospice stopping feeding and fluids, or overdosing painkillers, is a more horrible form of it.
We 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_in_the_United...
I 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.
Its 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.
> 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?
For 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.
If 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.
I 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]
Breast cancer.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nhregister/name/krystyn...
The internet has her death announcement, if you DDG it. All the information is on the task.
If 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.
The 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.
It's called "human interest". It interests many humans, just not you.
[dead]
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".
The 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.
Good news is that Firefox + Ublock Origin worked perfectly to avoid all this without any specific or extra setup from stock.
Dates 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.
End-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.
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Just read it