...you have a debilitating disease and your prognosis is poor, you ponder the thought of death. Do I want to suffer? Do I want to have my family drained emotionally and financially? Is this going to be painful? How can I be dependent on someone else to maintain by bodily functions? When faced with these questions, we become frightened. What if our disease causes us to lose all quality of life? Should we have the option to end our suffering by choosing a humane way of ending our life? One of my dogs became very ill, and I took him to the vet. The vet ran tests and found that Rocky had a cancerous tumor. The prognosis: poor. The vet told us what to expect in the next few months. He gave us the option of putting him to sleep right away, or sending us home with medication that would keep him comfortable for about three months. Well I bet if Rocky were able to make the decision, he would have opted to be mercifully medicated and peacefully die at that time. Instead I was thinking about myself. I could not picture our home without Rocky. I chose to extend his suffering for three more months with medication. Did I do this for me, or for Rocky? Do we have the right to force human beings of sound mind to prolong their suffering? Or should we allow them the choice of dying with dignity, or more to the point, dying when living becomes unbearable. Should we allow a person to decide how much he or she can bear or do we become the morality police. We will take a suffering animal and put this poor defenseless creature out of its misery, but a human has to suffer until the last breath. This is an ethical issue for physicians and health care workers. We are conditioned to preserve life at all costs. We can alleviate pain and suffering with strong narcotics, but they must be carefully administered so the patient does not become addicted to painkillers. Does this make sense? I remember...
