Euthanasia puts the elderly at risk: Legalisation contaminates the caring ethic and compromises our ability to trust doctors.
By Irene Ogrizek
The
current euthanasia debate in Quebec frightens me. As a woman of a
certain age, I fear I am heading into a future where I may lose
meaningful control of my life. Whether I live or die may hinge on the
kindness of individuals unknown to me, perhaps nurses or doctors, who
will be put in the position of determining my worth.
If I’m lucky and live past my retirement, evidence of all the things
I’ve accomplished in my career will be gone. How will I look as a 75
year-old to myself and others? How will I be judged?
When it comes to euthanasia, the slippery slope aspect of it keeps
being swept under the carpet. For me, it is the single most compelling
reason not to go forward and here’s why: I have seen the slippery slope
played out in the care my mother receives at her nursing home.
First I’d like to say that I chose this nursing home carefully; the
staff to resident ratio was good and the building was clean and bright.
It is located in a large Canadian city and is part of a government
network of homes. My mother’s pension plan covers her monthly bill, and
so I use leftover money to pay for extras, like paid companions, to
visit her. She has been disabled by a stroke and needs help wheeling
herself around.
Despite having helpers, my mother has gone through three periods of
unauthorized medicating. I believe she was given medications that made
her drowsy and docile and that were not included on her chart. Because
of her fragile health, and the fact that she tires naturally, I had some
difficulty, at least initially, detecting the problem.
The first time I noticed something was awry, it took a few visits to
make sure I wasn’t catching my mother during an unstable phase in her
health. When I saw her drowsiness was ongoing, however, I brought it up
with a nurse, who said my mother was simply tired. I asked to see her
chart anyway, just in case her medications had been changed and they’d
forgotten to tell me.
The nurse promised to leave a note for the doctor, reporting my
mother’s lethargy and asking him to examine her. I didn’t hear back from
anyone, but on my next visit, my mother was back to her old self, sharp
as a tack and telling me I needed to do a better job combing my hair
before I left the house. It was a good sign and when I asked about the
doctor’s examination, I was told it had been conducted and that there
were no new developments. I let the matter go, but of course wondered.
The next time it happened, the drowsiness was far more pronounced.
Using my phone, I took videos of my mother having lunch and then supper
every day for several days. At lunch she was her usual chipper self; at
supper she was unconscious. When I presented my evidence to the head
nurse, he didn’t even try to deny it. He said he would take care of it
internally – under his authority, that is – and that I could trust him
when he said it would stop. I did trust him and it did stop. However, he
resigned a few months later.
That was a year ago and I have just come off the third round of this
same problem. Starting a few weeks ago, I kept finding my mother
unaccountably drowsy, asked for a doctor to examine her and, within
days, she had miraculously recovered. Earlier in the month, her eyes had
been glassy and unfocused and she could barely communicate. Fearing the
worst, I had called her partner, who is now living near his children,
to come and say goodbye.
Now, I am sympathetic to nursing and personal support care staff. I
took care of my mother for some time before she went into a home and so
have a realistic idea of the energy it takes to care for her properly.
There’s no doubt about it: it’s hard work.
However, what is important, for the purposes of this discussion, is
the phenomenon of rogue healthcare workers. I believe this last bout of
over-medicating came about because there is probably one newly-placed
employee, on the morning shift, who wants to decrease his (or her)
workload and this is how he is doing it. The problem is not that the
oversight at the home is adequate: it has a good reputation deservedly.
It’s just that elderly residents like my mother are expected to be
poorly at times. Drugging her, under these circumstances, is easy.
I am worried about legalizing euthanasia because the chances are
excellent that similar patterns will arise but with graver
circumstances. Think of administrators being to urged to open beds in
hospitals or nursing homes. Imagine they are being asked to clear out
the most “expensive” patients. They would not have to euthanize,
necessarily. They could present an elderly patient in a drugged state
and convince a family that a catastrophic neurological event had
happened. They could also claim a sedated patient was simply withdrawing
from life. Having just seen my mother in this condition, without any
medications on her chart to explain it, I know it could happen. It’s
sad, but not all families are engaged enough to question an
institution’s findings.
The elderly are the most vulnerable to the unethical use of
“voluntary” euthanasia. They have financial and material wealth younger
relatives may covet, and they are more likely to be nudged into this
kind of “beyond hope” scenario. A little Benadryl or Dilaudid is all it
would take.
These problems will touch the rest of us. I keep hearing over and
over again, from supporters of euthanasia, how “It’s my life; I have a
right to take it if I want.” It’s true people have a right to commit
suicide. However, what I object to is the involvement of healthcare
staff. As someone who has seen abuse in the system, I do not want a
doctor who believes in euthanasia. I do not want this because if I am
given a bad diagnosis, he or she may push me toward it and away from a
more expensive life-saving option. This could be accomplished by
exaggerating the difficulties facing me; I could be told I’m going to
suffer a protracted and painful death.
And there are more complications.
Given the protectionism I’ve seen among most (although not all)
doctors, I don’t think it likely Quebecers will be told which doctors
are practicing euthanasia. I suspect the doctors who choose to do it
will not, perhaps for reasons of safety, be putting their names out in
the public sphere. Despite the fact that users of the system have a
right to know, I doubt we will.
So for all the cries of “It’s my life; I can do what I want with it,”
I say this: involving a doctor, a doctor in a pool of doctors we all
use, contaminates and compromises their decision-making and contaminates
and compromises our ability to trust them.
Another argument I keep hearing is this: why would you insist on
making someone suffer through unimaginable pain? How can you truly know
what another person is feeling? Here’s my answer: I believe my mother
was deliberately under-treated by a physician who tried to make a life
and death decision for her. Perhaps it’s because he heard my mother had
been athletic and decided she should not live out her years in a
wheelchair. I suspect important procedures had been postponed — too
often — because he had prioritized younger patients and de-prioritized
her. Ironically, those postponements are what led to her poor condition
in the end.
And that’s the problem. Assumptions were made in my mother’s case
too. Healthcare workers saw her future and decided it would be “cruel”
to let her live. This was said to me even after my mother had been told
of her prognosis, accepted her fate and told me she wanted to go on.
However, had she not become conscious when she did, and insisted on that
right, I have no doubt the infection she was suffering from would have
been allowed to take its course.
I’ve got a phrase for this: I call it euthanasia by attrition. Where
my mother was concerned, it was a back-room decision that could not have
been undone. In my view, the suffering of a small percentage of
patients, at the end of their lives, is not worth the taking of another
life arbitrarily. Even if my mother is sick and elderly, she still has
rights, including the right to go on living.
Here’s my final argument. Every time my mother has been drugged, I
myself was going through a down period, a period, in other words, when
my energy was flagging and I scheduled my visits in the evenings and
made them quick. I am the sole caregiver for my mother and after years
of taking care of her, there are just times when I need to go easy on
myself.
It’s been at those times that the medicating started. So if this
pattern of events is anything to go by, a heightened vigilance is what
is needed for me to prevent yet another episode. However, this is easier
said than done.
Being vigilant takes time and energy and is not always possible, for
individuals like myself and institutions like hospitals. It’s this kind
of naive faith – that we have the time, energy and resources to oversee
euthanasia – that is an illusion. It’s this same naive faith – that the
paperwork controlling euthanasia will do its job – that is equally
illusory. The controls will slip. Crack open a history book is what I
want to say when I hear euthanasia supporters accusing me of being a
holy-roller and going on about their rights.
That’s right, a history book. Our province’s future, when it comes to euthanasia, is in one.
Editor’s note. Irene Ogrizek teaches English literature in
Montreal, Quebec. This article was republished with permission from her
blog http://ireneogrizek.ca by Mercatornet.com.
Source: NRLC News
Rick Smith, the effervescent dad of “
Depending
on which story you read late yesterday or earlier today, the average
reader will come away with a radically different understanding of
yesterday’s decision by Austin-based U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel on
portions of Texas’s pro-life HB 2.
Let’s
put together a few quotes that dramatically illustrate the gap between
what people were told about ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges; what
had been known for years (which the Administration nonetheless
adamantly insists it didn’t know); and the stubborn insistence that the
exchanges are “working” and will work “better.”
WASHINGTON
– Tomorrow, a law will go into effect that will protect unborn children
in Texas who are capable of feeling pain. The Texas bill, HB 2, was
signed by Governor Perry on July 18, 2013. Despite efforts to derail
other elements of HB 2, the central portion protecting pain-capable
unborn children was never challenged.
It
was the kind of assignment that makes you nostalgic for paper-mache
volcanoes and baking soda. Freshmen and sophomores in a social studies
class at St. Joseph-Ogden High School in Illinois were asked to make
life-and-death decisions concerning people they’d never met.
It
is no doubt true that the impact programs such as “Saturday Night Live”
and Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” can have can be absurdly
exaggerated. But since their program is decidedly from the “progressive”
side, when (as has been the case over the last week) they’ve ridiculed
the rollout of ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges, it says something
about how universally obvious the administration’s incompetence is.
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