My wife was a palliative care nurse. She has seen hundreds of patients in the late stages of their lives. She has always told me she wants to go well before she reaches that stage and has a do not resuscitate order.

I would imagine many other nurses and doctors would feel the same way. You may want to expose yourself to people who only have "brief moments of lucidity" otherwise be careful what you wish for or you might receive it.

https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-di...

Oh! Look! Anecdotes from a country where you can get broke if you go the hospital! Surely it applies to people all over the world!

You imagine and you assume. Please don't argue about ending other people life based on assumptions and imagination.

Okay, as a paramedic, who has lived in Australia and the UK as well as the US.

End of life quality of life is its own issue, regardless of who is or isn't paying.

Let me paint you a couple of examples and have you tell me about your desire to face any one of them rather than finding peace:

1) the lady with metastasized bone cancer who (thankfully) we were taking home so she could die there, as her family had set up a bed in a family owned home so she could watch the sunrise. She was a morphine drip for her pain. To be clear, most patients with cancer can be controlled by oral morphine at 200mg/day. She was receiving 120mg per HOUR. And still we had to drive the ambulance painfully (hah) slowly because every little bump in the road (not pothole, but bump) caused screams of pain from the back. Despite her being 45kg or so, we used six people to move her into the home (normally two would have done it) to make it as smooth a process as possible, and she was still incontinent from pain as a result). I do take some mild comfort in knowing she got to see two more sunrises out of hospital. But even as someone who has had multiple kidney stones (and large ones at that), I could not imagine enduring what she was.

You call it "living", it's not, I chose "enduring" for a reason.

2) A man who had Alzheimers with some lucidity. Maybe 10 minutes an hour. The other times he spent in terror, because he had a constant playback loop of about four separate WW2 scenarios where he was an infantryman in Europe. During those times he was entirely reliving the most terrifying experiences of his life, his eyes would be wide, his pulse would be 160+, he'd be shaking and unapproachable (because he _would_ attack you), pinned down by German troops in a French village. Or breaking his leg as he cut his parachute when he was stuck in a tree. Or when he was temporarily deafened by mortar and artillery fire landing near him, spraying him with mud and bricks and glass.

You're entitled to your own opinion as we all are. But it's certainly not a coincidence that _many_ people who have spent a good amount of time around end of life events want nothing less than to see it happen to them (or for their own loved ones to have to see it happen).

And all of the above, again, has nearly zero to do with "who is paying the bill".

And a seemingly subtle but very important distinction: it is not _ending_ someone's life to _not prolong_ it beyond nature. And trying to twist the parents remarks about "do not resuscitate" into "ending peoples lives" is a blatant reductionism that is neither merited nor fair. Apropos of anything else, a DNR is the written expression of the _patients_ wishes. Just as you want your own freedom.

We spend more in the last year (be it NHS, Medicare in Australia, or health insurance) of people's lives than we do in the last decade of their lives, and more in the last decade than we do on the rest of their life.

> You call it "living", it's not

Well she did not kill herself despite being able to, now did she?

> A man who had Alzheimers with some lucidity. Maybe 10 minutes an hour.

Who again did not take those 10 minutes to take his life.

Nietzsche wrote many of his pieces of literature in similar conditions.

> But it's certainly not a coincidence that _many_ people who have spent a good amount of time around end of life events want nothing less than to see it happen to them

Or that could be a bias towards spending most time with the most extreme examples. A bit like how policemen tend to become more racist during the course of their career. A professional's opinion on a moral issue can be more informed but also often more biased.

> Well she did not kill herself despite being able to, now did she?

She asked not to be resuscitated. She wasn't. On a couple of occasions, now, you have conflated DNR (or POLST, more accurately, these days, Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatments) with the act of suicide.

> Who again did not take those 10 minutes to take his life.

Again.

> Or that could be a bias towards spending most time with the most extreme examples. A bit like how policemen tend to become more racist during the course of their career. A professional's opinion on a moral issue can be more informed but also often more biased.

Oof. Comparing a medical professionals experience with the negative side of end of life palliative care with an increasing racism is a pretty ugly and unjustified comparison, one that says that you believe that those physicians, paramedics, nurses have intensified flaws or failings by virtue of recognizing/ believing that not everyone needs to or should stay alive to the very last by means of medical care, regardless of their wishes or quality of life, that that is somehow akin to "racism" in terms of character traits. Wow.

> On a couple of occasions, now, you have conflated DNR (or POLST, more accurately, these days, Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatments) with the act of suicide.

I certainly did not and having a few idiots who cannot make the difference does not mean we can't still be opposed to other people choosing for you what it means to "die with dignity", which was the starter of this discussion.

And I am happy that you find racism abhorrent but I doubt you misunderstood me to the point of missing that I am just criticizing the idea that professionals the most exposed to a situation necessarily have unbiased and superior moral opinion on this situation.

I’ll assume you haven’t been close to people in the last stages of some of the crueller diseases such as MND/ALS.

See? People would assume tons of things about other people. And one common assumption is that "what I want for me is what others want for them."

My opinion on the issue was already strong, but seeing people die after long diseases and people around them talking about "unplugging" them is what made me certain I do not want euthanasia.

My grandfather wanted to live even with half a lung functional and painful breathing.

Do what you want with your life, but please don't decide for others.

Lungs don't control whether you have any understanding of the people around you...

Trust me, when your brain does not receive the amount of oxygen it needs, even though mostly breathing pure oxygen at that point, your understanding becomes blurry at best.

I have no interest in deciding things for random internet strangers.

The idiom is "speak for yourself"

(sorry if I offend)

Not at all, thanks! I stumble on these every time I inadvertently translate things directly from my native language. Ill be more careful thanks.

Corrected, by the way.

The definition of "idiom" as per the google search is

"a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light )."

The sentence "speak for yourself" has the meaning that is directly deduced from its words. How does it qualify as an idiom ?