"
Aja Riggs has undergone aggressive radiation and chemotherapy treatment for advanced uterine cancer. The 49-year-old Santa Fe resident remembers the feeling of her skin burning, all the medication, the nausea and the fatigue so immense that even talking sapped too much energy."
All she wanted was the choice to end her life if the suffering became too great.
She has that option now thanks to a New Mexico judge's landmark ruling Monday, which clears the way for competent, terminally ill patients to seek their doctors' help in getting prescription medication if they want to end their lives on their own terms.
Who said 'you can't always get what you want'?
Of the song, Jagger said: "'You Can't Always Get What You Want'... I'd also had this idea of having a choir, probably a gospel choir, on the track, but there wasn't one around at that point. Jack Nitzsche, or somebody, said that we could get the London Bach Choir and we said, 'That will be a laugh.'"
Richie Unterberger (Allmusic song reviewer) concludes of the song, "Much has been made of the lyrics reflecting the end of the overlong party that was the 1960s, as a snapshot of Swinging London burning out. That's a valid interpretation, but it should also be pointed out that there's also an uplifting and reassuring quality to the melody and performance. This is particularly true of the key lyrical hook, when we are reminded that we can't always get what we want, but we'll get what we need."
And what we need is
ObamaCare to work... or something.
28 comments:
And they replaced In God We Trust with Arbeit Mach Frei above the judge's bench.
Sadly, I predicted something like this 5 years ago: link
Props to Lem for the subtle allusion to the euthanasia scene in Soylent Green.
It's on YouTube, probably.
I don't see the problem.
The government owns us.
We are useful to the government only so long as we are working and paying tax money to the government.
When we become too ill or too old to produce money for the government, the government has little use for us and it wants to spend as little money on our medical needs as it possibly can.
Hence the death panels baked into ObamaCare, so the government can say "no lung transplant for you" and offer you the blue pill Obama spoke of while he was selling his plan.
Really, really ill? ObamaCare mandates that your MD have an 'end of life' discussion with you. And now some states are encouraging the patient to take the patient's life. There is no humanitarian reason for this; the reason is cost reduction. It is not, in the government's eyes, worth keeping you alive any longer.
How horrible. How murderous.
There was a book called Final Exit I think in the 70s, that my father bought a copy of.
He wasn't going to get trapped by somebody else's doctrine of suffer until you die.
In the Fall 2013 issue of Lapham's Quarterly there's an eyewitness account of Japanese parents at Saipan tossing their children off a cliff onto the rocks below so they won't get roasted and eaten by the advancing American soldiers.
I'd prefer to go some other way but that's just me.
rhhardin said...
I don't see the problem.
Nor do I. If life becomes unbearable for me because of the pain of metastatic cancer and the associated treatments I want the right to end my life in peaceful way without any legal risk to my next of kin. This should be the right of any adult.
Most people are unrealistic about what their life will be like as they approach death. It remains something of a taboo subject even now. It is not going to be as neat, clean and painless as an execution and executions don't look like a lot of fun.
This is a good place to start for anyone curious about what their own death from cancer might feel like.
http://lisabadams.com/2014/01/06/update-162014/
I have two relatives who I suspect offed themselves with medical assistance.
I've got no proof except: (1) they were both in a very bad way (one a blinding, paralyzing stroke; the other advanced lung cancer); (2) the last conversation I had with each had a weird sort of mood about it; and (3) they were dead soon after those weird conversations.
A while back I gave authority to one of my brothers-in-law to pull the plug on me because he was a right nasty, heartless little bastard and I figured he was just the man for the job.
And now I've lived long enough that he's become all soft-hearted and I don't think at this point he's a better choice than any other relative. Damn!
The necessity for dishonest language gives away the game.
"All she wanted was the choice to end her life if the suffering became too great."
Unless this person is utterly immobile, and/or under constant guard at all times, she already has that choice.
She can end her life in a variety of ways. That is terribly wrong. But it's dishonest to say she doesn't now have that "choice."
What she and others want is to create a system of facilitation.
Mark my words: when you have doctors entering into this, you will have training in how to kill people in medical schools. And you will have people who are pushed, prodded and perhaps coerced into participating in that training.
And you will, in time, have advocacy for forcing medical personnel to participate. And of course, forcing lots of other people to cooperate via funding via insurance, and perhaps tax money.
The narcissism of not only insisting on the "right" to kill oneself--but also to insist that another human being must do it for you--is astonishing.
Eric:
"Pulling the plug" is far from the same thing as injecting poison to kill someone.
If I am on my last legs and I know it, I don't have to call the EMTs to put paddles to my chest.
But calling for someone to come inject me with a death potion is entirely different.
I dated a girl who was an LPN in an intensive care unit and she told me that sometimes the doctors would subtlely hint that yet another "code" from some patient or other need not be her most super-urgent priority, depending on the situation.
I wasn't sure whether to believe her. I dated several nurses and one thing they all had in common was a certain tendency to talk themselves up.
"Second Judicial Judge Nan Nash said such patients have a fundamental right to seek aid in dying because the New Mexico Constitution prohibits the state from depriving a person from enjoying life and liberty or seeking and obtaining safety and happiness."
"This court cannot envision a right more fundamental, more private or more integral to the liberty, safety and happiness of a New Mexican than the right of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying," the judge wrote.
I am largely against doctor assisted suicide but I acknowledge that there are some arguments in its favor.
However, the judges reasoning in the decision is one of the more fucked-up things I ever read.
Life = Death
Liberty = Death
Safety = Death
Happiness = Death
Fr Martin Fox said...
The narcissism of not only insisting on the "right" to kill oneself--but also to insist that another human being must do it for you--is astonishing.
There is nothing narcissistic about acknowledging the inevitability of your own mortality. Medical technology is a blunt and fallible instrument, more often than not having the ability to prolong suffering without offering any hope of a cure. Few people have a 'natural' death any more. Personally I want to die in my sleep from a massive heart attack, but the chances of that happening are not as good as I would like.
Seems to me they're talking about doctors writing scripts but I could be wrong about that.
The solution depicted in Logan's Run solves all this dithering and ethical/moral gray areas in a very bureaucratically simple unambiguous way...silly people..
For starters, although not a perfect solution to the patient/family/physician dilemma, having a good living will (frequently updated) with multiple copies easily accessed ( one cy in Bank Deposit box, a duplicate one with one's attny, etc.) by more than one trusted advisor (like family member PLUS attny, etc) is a good starting point..
"Personally I want to die in my sleep from a massive heart attack, . . ."
I know a guy who was a county detective who said he once got called to a house to find a guy dead in his armchair, in front of the TV set, his dog on the floor beside him, AND THE GUY'S HAND ON THE DOG AS IF HE DIED RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF PETTING HIS DOG.
I'm all, like, no way.
So I asked my brother-in-law the physician. He said it's possible.
Damn!
ARM:
I think I was clear. I wasn't talking about acknowledging ones mortality. That's a red herring.
I made very clear the narcissism is in expecting life to unfold on ones own terms in a general way; and in this particular situation, to expect other human beings to facilitate your death.
Progressives who advocate for a death industry masquerading as "medicine" are forcing us to divide the country. If this trend continues, a lot of us will want to say, "If this is how it must be, we'll have two types of doctors: "life doctors" and "death doctors."
Because I don't want ANYTHING to do with the "death doctors" this is going to cause to metastasize into our society.
Nothing at all.
Oh. Oops. Obamacare will force me to have a "death doctor" because I won't have a choice.
Lovely little totalitarian paradise of "choice" you progressives are creating.
The notion that you can train doctors to be about death and then expect them to forget all about it when you want them to foster life is a colossal, willful deception.
Especially when, as Eric points out, medical people are already dealing death in hidden ways--which of course they can do now and it's pretty difficult to stop them.
Which is exactly why it's so foolish to cultivate this, foster it, train for it...
Good God! You think these paragons of virtue are going to leave you alone when you write out (before your operation), "not my time?" When a little "oops" saves everyone a lot of money?
My father died last year. Mesothelioma. He was 88 The last few days of his life were spend in the hospice wing of a Catholic hospital in our area.
The care was extraordinary. He was given sufficient morphine and other medicines that he had little pain, rested well and could communicate with us. He had control over the morphine via a pump. No waiting for a nurse.
Had the drugs he was given failed to mollify the pain he was suffering, the next step would have been a medically induced coma until natural death.
Other patients received spinal nerve blocks to end pain.
While staying with him I took breaks and walked laps through the hospice wing. Most rooms had a patient; none of the patients were yelling in pain, and all were near death from one disease or another. All were well cared for and were medicated to relieve pain.
To suggest that medicine cannot relieve deep and protracted pain is simply not true.
The narcissism of not only insisting on the "right" to kill oneself--but also to insist that another human being must do it for you--is astonishing
Spot on.
I assume you have to take some course in med school on ethics and I assume they go into how to make decisions when a patient's interest conflicts with that of society-at-large.
Virulent diseases. Herd immunity. Psychopathologies. Conservation of scarce resources. That sort of thing.
I had a doctor once who would not take cash for a flu shot because I wasn't in some sort of CDC category, although in all fairness that was a long time ago. That same doctor REFUSED to recommend a chiropractor, not because he didn't know any, but because he didn't believe in them.
I didn't always get from him what I wanted, but he did stick his finger in my butt, so sometimes I got what I needed.
Michael Haz said...
To suggest that medicine cannot relieve deep and protracted pain is simply not true.
No one suggested this. It is clearly possible to extend life in a morphine induced haze, where a 'natural' death would have occurred much earlier, if for no other reason than the stress of the pain itself. Does anyone benefit? I think the answer to that question is personal and we will all have different break even points. Quality of life is important to me, over and above the length of life. Others will make different calculations.
The suggestion by another poster that doctors all looking for opportunities to off their patients is both paranoid and offensive. MDs are highly motivated to extend the lives of patients, if for no other reason than professional prestige.
Eric the Fruit Bat said...
That same doctor REFUSED to recommend a chiropractor.
In all fairness, recommend is a strong term to use in this case.
Euthanasia Without Discrimination
by Theodore Dalrymple
(excerpt):
"n essence, at least as reported, he had claimed his “right” to die as he pleased.
Such a right can, of course, only be exercised if someone has the corresponding duty to ensure that it is complied with, in this case the doctor. And if doctors have the duty to kill people such as Mr. Pauwels, then before long doctors who refuse to do so—or at least fail to put their patients in touch with someone (a specialist in fatal injections, perhaps) who will do so—will face sanctions.
Furthermore, the principle of nondiscrimination will mean that before long everyone will be able claim the right to demand of his doctor that he put him down, for there is no reason at all that only the aged and mortally ill should have this inestimable benefit. Why should the dying have all the best deaths?"
She can end her life in a variety of ways. That is terribly wrong. But it's dishonest to say she doesn't now have that "choice."
Well said, Father. I've lost an uncle I was very close to and a father to cancer and a 96 year old Grandpa to complications from pneumonia (basically old age).
End of life care through hospice is already managed fairly well. Who is forcing the woman to continue treatments? Who is telling her she needs to eat? So silly.
And since somebody brought up Lisa Adams, I'll add the NYT published a hit piece about the woman because the 37 year old mother dares to fight cancer. One of the most recommended comments consists of someone complaining that only the rich get access to cancer treatments, so its not fair to the rest of us. I call BS. My immigrant dad worked as a low level mechanic his entire life. He received fantastic care.
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