In a moving keynote lecture read by his friend Tony Robinson, author and Alzheimer’s sufferer Terry Pratchett makes a plea for the legalisation of euthanasia.
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7 Comments
If as I understand over 80% of the community are in support of this proposition I’d do not understand why politicians are so afraid of the concept.
Moving.
@Greg - Because politicians seem to spend a lot of time listen to the other 20% of the population who are largely hidebound, religious, right wing whack jobs.
Now that was a class act.
In a world where lame home videos, of not much worth, go viral at the click of a mouse.
This was a lovely surprise.
Ta for the heads up Crikey.
It was a deight to be in London and see the BBC broadcast especially with the brief introduction by Terry Pratchett explaining the unusual form of the disease.
I thought the question was so comprehensably addressed that the text should be widely circulated & the debate pursued.
Many thanks to Crikey for so thoughtful a selection. And a huge thankyou to Terry Pratchett & the BBC
In the final weeks of life if one is fortunate enough to be admitted to a hospital under a palliative care specialist there is hope that drugs given to alleviate pain will reduce the death process from a month or more to maybe several days or a couple of weeks, depending on the body’s fragility at the time. Cancer may well riddle the bones, brain, organs etc. but if the heart continues to pump and the lungs continue to breath, whilst the cancer continues to grow, dreadful pain continues and increases, until the heart and lungs fail or the cancer eats through a major organ or vessel.
This may often take a long time whilst the pain increases. Why should the patient and their family have to go through this dreadful dying process when there is no hope at all? Eventually “shut down” starts and this takes many days as anyone one who has nursed a dying patient or has sat with a loved one knows. Why when there’s no hope of altering the course of the disease process should anyone have to go through the long drawn out process of dying? But that’s generally the plight of terminal cancer patients.
What about those who live in nursing homes, or are being cared for at home by their family, or those struggling along living alone? Think about people who are en-caged by strokes and motor- neuron disease. Those with chronic emphysemia, progressing Alzheimer’s disease and all the other awful totally debilitating diseases which are progressing or have arrived at bringing with them no quality of life? Why should people with such diseases be forced to live on as their diseases worsen and there is no hope for them to ever get better? Why do we the healthy force the terminally ill and those without hope to continue living? Could it be that we the healthy can’t cope with the thought that we will eventually be in the same position as them?
Eventually viruses and infections cause pneumonia, infective bedsores, etc that would normally lead to death for these peolpe who are lingering in nursing homes or elsewhere. Generally then they are sent off to acute care hospitals where they are given antiobiotics and intravenous fluids to reverse the body’s attempt to cease living. Infection free they are then sent back to their incapicitated diseased existance in the nursing home etc that they came from until thier broken bodies attempt to die yet again when this process is once more stopped by another round of antibiotics and heroic aggressive treatments.
In 100 years most of us will have died. Why is it we can’t accept that we too will develop diseases that will kill us and allow people with awful terminal diseases to die with dignity on their own terms?
Margaret Hurd
RN since 1967
I have the utmost respect for this man in his pursuit of this cause (I always enjoyed his books too). Thanks for the pointer to this.