Guardian article today that might resonate here

💯 @ShinyNewName1988 Your grandmother's experience sounds very similar to mine

Also echoing what several others have said this morning, my personal feeling is that it is frankly callous and cruel to trivialise the struggles of loving carers struggling with doing the best for their elderly loved ones while trying to support everybody else in the family and keeping their jobs and keeping their sanity, by dismissing their difficulties as "inconvenience."

On the whole on this thread, posters are not advocating for euthanising people because they’re inconvenient. What they’re arguing for (and I hope posters will correct me if I’m wrong) is allowing death to take its natural course when it arrives.

I'd go further than this. Natural deaths can be awful. I want treatment for me, mine, everybody when it can help a person lead a life which has quality. But if quality is compromised to the level that renders that life not worth living for an idividual, then I want intervention to end it earlier than it would naturally.
I realise there's a billion pitfalls, judgment calls, difficulties, complications, how long is a piece of string... so I don't know how we get to a better system with the necessary safeguards in place.

On the whole on this thread, posters are not advocating for euthanising people because they’re inconvenient. What they’re arguing for (and I hope posters will correct me if I’m wrong) is allowing death to take its natural course when it arrives.

Advanced dementia combined with serious, recurring infections requiring intravenous antibiotics, for example, is surely an indication that somebody is at the end of their lives. To treat the infection aggressively with intravenous antibiotics is, to me at least, interfering in the natural process of death and not particularly compassionate. To decide not to treat with antibiotics and instead to make the person as comfortable as possible is not euthanising them because they’re ‘inconvenient.’ This is the type of situation that most posters are talking about, from my reading at least.

For example, my great grandmother voluntarily went into an assisted living-style community in her 90s, where she enjoyed a pretty high quality of life beyond 100. She then developed dementia, caught a severe infection in short order, and nobody thought to give her intravenous antibiotics because it was clear she was at the end of her life. She died having experienced a high quality of life until the last few weeks. We certainly
didn’t euthanise her by not insisting on treatment- she was old and dying, and it was allowed to just happen. To me, the course of the end of her life is what I would want for myself- good care and support in old age, but not prolonging life with intrusive interventions once severe decline starts. Of course, we were terribly sad to lose her (she was a force of nature) but overall felt, and I’m sure she would agree, that she had a life well lived and a dignified death.

My grandmother, by contrast, had a stroke in her 80s and developed dementia. For the first year or two, she seemed very happy despite her dementia and thoroughly enjoyed visits from family, enthusiastically participated in all the activities offered by the care home, could use a walker to get outside and enjoyed sitting on the patio in the sunshine, and wasn’t experiencing any pain. But as her dementia worsened, she became immobile and incontinent, unable to recognise family members, and was inconsolably distressed almost all of the time. When she developed infections, they were treated with hospital admissions and antibiotics, to be discharged back to the care home in a worse condition than before until the next crisis. It’s this type of intervention that I feel is so wrong- it prolonged suffering without any apparent goal other than keeping her alive at all costs. In comparison to great grandmother, she had a much longer period of her life spent miserable and in pain, and a much less dignified end.

Surely that’s it? It’s not inconvenient. It’s almost impossible having to make decisions between supporting your parent, your partner or your children. Because you can’t do all those things.

And retain your own sanity and health at the same time!

Is that honestly what you’ve got from this thread, that people’s main feeling is that it’s all “inconvenient”. Not exhausting, distressing, impossible, guilt-laden? Not to mention awful for the person being cared for. Anyone suggesting euthanasia or assisted dying on this thread is either talking about it for themself, or talking about how much their parent is suffering. My mum is only in her 60s, and nothing scares her more than the thought her last ~10 yrs of life might look like her father’s. The only solace if that happens is that if she does end up like her father, she won’t know it.

Sad

Sorry for your loss @Nat6999. It's tragic really watching our parents go from strong capable people to frail shadows of themselves in a few years.

I've just lost my mum at the beginning of the month, I turned 60 the week after. I lost my dad in 2019 & have cared for my mum until October last year when she was admitted to hospital with delirium which led her to be in hospital until the end of January before going into a care homewhere she lasted just over a month before dying. Ds & I cared for her through Covid, her being admitted to hospital with heart problems which ended up with her having a pacemaker & her catching Covid. I have watched her age, she was 80 when my dad died & fully capable of caring for herself, I've nursed her through falls, sporadic memory loss as well as the COPD & type 2 diabetes she also suffered from. I can see a way forwards once the house is cleared & sold after 7 years of my life being on pause.

It's a bit silly calling someone's mental health into question because they have different opinions from you and express them strongly. Just think about what you said for a minute. It's quite disturbing. Do you undermine ppl every time they come at something from a different angle. And as for you not being able to identify the mission creep of wanting to get rid of inconvenient sections of society, well......if you haven"'t noticed anything, there's not much I can say about it. It's up to you to do the reading and draw your own conclusions.

Yes that'scfine. If they want.that. But i dont want it to go the other way so that i have to conform to what you think should hsppen.

You don't come across as someone who is taking care of themselves. Your replies indicate that you might need to find some support yourself.

As for a creeping move towards euthanizing anything that is ' inconvenient'
Other than the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is extremely limited in its scope, I can't see any creep at all myself.
Perhaps I'm missing something?

If you read what I said, that is a ridiculous joining of the dots.

Having a different opinion to you doesnt make me naive. And as far as I'm concerned you were extremely patronising telling me to take care of myself as well. What on earth do you know about me. Why should my looking after my father mean I'm not taking care of myself. What a ridiculous assumption to make. Why conflate those two things.

I'm fairly sure I didn't say that. My point has been that there seems to me to be a creeping move towards euthanizing anything that is ' inconvenient' and , while I accept that ppl will care for their relatives in whichever way they choose, I don't want to be dragged in on that kind of normalisation. If that's not how it came across, then sorry for the confusion, but I choose to love and care for my father and I don't want my approached to be compromised because a lot of ppl are pissed off caring and would
ra ther stick a needle in the ppl who have become a pain in the arse to rhem. That is what I meant. But I certainly dont believe anyone has the right to decide someone else should DIE, except in extreme cases.

For myself, for years I have opted out of everything. Smear tests, breast scans, all that. I have an Advanced Decision to refuse treatment form signed and ready, and a file packed with funeral paid for, bank details etc. It's been nice on the whole, on the carousel of life, but I'm in my late 60s and well aware that at some point in the next 10 years or so it'll be time to stop clutching onto the ride and get off. As happened a generation or two ago with much less fuss and drama than now.

And the last 50yrs when it has (thankfully) become much much more common for women to also have a career, leave abusive marriages etc. But on the flip side, means that they are not at home full time and able to care for their elderly relatives, but now have to juggle work, and caring for children and older relatives.

My neighbour is 80. Until Christmas she was caring for her mother, who died aged 104. I've known her 30 years and more, she was a lovely adventurous, intelligent person. She worked till she was 65 with plans to travel, and dance, she taught dancing, but from the very beginning, her retirement was all caring. It went on and on and on, once a few years ago she told someone said 'your mother is amazing.' And I said, 'it's you who are amazing,' and she cried. She loved her mother, she was a good daughter but I hope to goodness I never do that to my dcs.

"To what end?" has become my refrain whenever my mother agrees to my poor DF getting vaccinations or antibiotics or calorie dense food and drink. He is in the depths of dementia - it's horrific.

Roughly unchanged for millennia… until the last 50 years when medicines and surgical interventions meant we could treat whatever was threatening to kill someone and then they recover and wait for the next thing to come along. Heart medications, dialysis, pacemakers, antibiotics, insulin etc all allow us many more years of not being healthy but not yet being dead.

I agree with that @SpiritAdder, and it was usually the daughter with grown up children or an unmarried niece who did the caring. Those elderly were known as 'invalids' when I was young. The women were basically unpaid nurses (richer people could afford the real thing). The one difference was that the drive to prolong life wasn't as aggressive as it is now. People were allowed to fade away naturally, and living into your nineties was much less common. Many people now survive cancer and heart problems in early old age which would have ended their lives sooner a couple of generations ago.

Extended care for aged parents isn’t a new phenomenon.

No wonder it is an opinion piece as it is an autobiographical account of one woman’s family.

Yes people died at younger ages than now, but the gap between healthy life expectancy and total life expectancy - that window where aged care is needed- has been roughly unchanged for millennia.

Instead of nursing aged parents at home, we now have institutionalised it into aged care homes. The burden on women is less than it was, not more.

I couldn't comment on whether you are an idiot or not. Naive I'd say, not able to face up to things and defensive, as well as rude and aggressive in your communications.

For the last 25 years of my Dad’s life he needed more and more care. Doctors prolonged life, which resulted in a life for him of poor quality and torment, and so much juggling of responsibilities for me that in the end, I felt I was going insane.

Support services do not compliment extending life. My dad passed away during lockdown and it would have been much kinder to him if he had gone before he did. I love(d) my dad very much and I wish he’d had a better end.

Ok, what about the elderly who write living wills, who in their younger years are very clear that they wouldn’t want to live in certain circumstances, then they get to those circumstances and there are no options for their carers other than to repeatedly say ‘there’s nothing I can do’. You say have some imagination for Japanese inventions, but how about using your imagination to consider what it is like for other people being in very different circumstances to you and your dad?!

I think there is a degree of objectivity about what is a low quality of life. When in her 40s my mum enjoyed horse riding. All her adult life she enjoyed travel and her and my dad lived overseas for almost a decade. In her 60s she began volunteering at a hospice and only gave it up at 84 when she began to show signs of dementia. Even then in her mid 80s we would go on 3-4 mile walks together.

Now at 93 she is in a nursing home with advanced dementia. Doubly incontinent with skin excoriation which is currently infected so in discomfort every time she moves. She regularly has eczema style skin rashes and infections so needs special prescription shampoos, emollient creams, lots of personal care which she hates and even then needs antibiotics and currently steroids to try to control her skin. She didn’t have any of these skin issues till about 10 years ago. Now they severely impact her daily life and seemingly they won’t ever be eradicated. And because she has advanced dementia she doesn’t understand why she itches, is in pain and needs to be exposed to other people so frequently for personal care. Sometimes she needs three people to change her pad as she needs someone to distract and comfort her while the other two try to get it done as soon as possible. Don’t tell me that is a high quality life.

My mum left a letter saying she did not want to live ‘a life that is not a life’. What I would personally like is a team of vets and a team of doctors to get together and agree a set of criteria which could be applied to all our family members - four legged and two - to objectively determine a point at which it is agreed that, if a person has left a living will asking for this, they are allowed to be treated with the kindness shown to our pets and put to sleep. But as we cannot even get the right to die if we are terminally ill with cancer I don’t hold out much hope.