In The Worst Situations

When I saw this topic, I was concerned about having enough to say about it.  I don't know much about the laws or reasons behind assisted suicide, so I though this post was going to be super short.  So, I would like to thank Kelsey very much for her topic announcement and her research on the subject!  I think the questions she posted were great, so I'm going to use them as a semi-guideline, if that is all right with everyone.

Okay, so I started thinking about this topic and the little I knew about assisted suicide.  If someone is terminally ill and only have a few months to live with little hope of ever getting better, there is always a chance that they will surpass the doctor's expectations and live for a year or more.  Doctors can just give an estimate to how a person's body is going to respond to something, but they can't actually tell the person what will happen with complete certainty.  Even multiple doctors can be fooled into thinking one way, and something else may occur.  I didn't want to make this about me, so I will go into a short version of the example that automatically comes to my mind when talking about proving doctors wrong.  Those of you who know this already, bear with me.  When I was born three and a half months early, I had a fifteen percent estimation of actually surviving and a zero percent chance of ever walking.  All of the doctors thought that if I even survived, I would be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.  Needless to say, twenty years later I am walking and able to do much more than anyone ever thought possible back then.

Off the subject of my lovely life story and back to assisted suicide.  I think if someone doesn't have much time to live and they don't think they have anything to live for, they should be allowed to make the decision of whether or not to commit some form of suicide , assisted or not.  Personally, if I was stuck in a white-walled sterile-smelling hospital with no one to visit me and very little time left to live, I think I would want to at least be allowed the option of choosing when and how I want to die.  I'm not saying I would take it, because I like living way too much and would refuse to die in a hospital anyway, but having the option is much better then not.  If someone wanted to die in their own home instead of a hospital, I say let them.  It's certainly the choice I would make, but I hate hospitals so I may be a little biased.

One of Kelsey's questions was does Do Not Resuscitate count as assisted suicide?  I don't think that it should, because it is the person's own decision, or the decision of their family.  It's what they wanted, so I think they should be allowed to choose not to be resuscitated.  If someone is in horrible pain and chooses DNR, I wouldn't want to bring them back to a world of pain and little hope of ever getting better.

These examples are kind of doom and gloom and extreme, and there are always exceptions and different cases.  All the different situations would be impossible to write in one post, so I'm just generalizing the worst situations.  If someone is able to live, heart beating and brain working, then they should try to do so, because you never know what may happen to turn a horrible situation into a better one.  They may have few people in the world who care for them, but at least the doctors/nurses care for the most part if no one else does.  That's something, right?

The last question Kelsey asked was "Should people be required to live if they are physically capable of doing so, because anything else would be immoral?"  The key words here seem to be "physically capable."  If someone is able to physically live a life, that is very different from actually living a life.  One is "going through the motions" (to take a quote from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode), without actually paying attention or caring about what is going on, and actually living is an investment in other people as well as the physically body.  You have to be mentally prepared to live, and want to actually live, not just do what is expected of you.  If you just do what is expected of you without any emotions or caring, are you really living?  Or do you just walk around like a zombie who is as good as dead anyway?

Anyway, this got  long and kind of ramble-y, and I apologize for that and for forcing my life story upon you as an example, even if it was a good example of the that particular idea.  So, Kathleen is up tomorrow, and I can't wait to read what everyone else has to say about this topic.  Cheers.