To think that we need to have an honest conversation about euthanasia and care costs

[Noras]

So there are some interesting stats published by the Gov about the cost of cares the end of life and whatever way you look at it, it’s expensive. Obviously the most expensive is hospital care at about £400 to £500 per day but also care in care homes is high.Most of that could be avoided with an injection.

I have watched both my parents die and I have been left traumatised by it. My mother died from starving to death due to dementia in a non nursing bed with no pay relief other than paracetamol. She was clutching the sheets and morning for 14 days. My father died of the most gruesome cancer. We nursed him at home but we still had one 24 hour carer at the end paid for by CHC ( he was plus 2 for eg the commode and washing hence we still did it).

Whilst my parents were dying I could not bear to let them go but now after several years I think ‘What on Earth was that?’ With the benefit of hindsight I regret every mouthful of food that I fed my mother. She did not even know who I was and was in a different World but yet she was my beautiful mother.

I regret every time that I carefully measured morphine for my dad because I did not want to give him an overdose

I am haunted by the prospect of getting dementia. I am scared sick of cancer and dying from it as the pain meds never kept uo with the pain. When we just had the pain patches they were always too weak and we were always behind the race to keep up with the pain. When we got the end of life kit, as a relative I was always too scared to give ( I think ) enough morphine to top up the pain patches so my dad would he in agony. I could not bear to let my dad go - it was so painful,

So this is the question; Do we need to grow up and really think about euthanasia?

Over two years of my life were consumed by the impending death of my parents ( I still visited and cared for my mum in a care home despite it costing my dad several hundred pounds weekly as I wanted to care for her).

No, I disagree with you.

We are not 'killing' premature babies/very disabled people/very sick people by not offering every single life saving intervention to keep them alive. Most people could have their life extended if they received optimal healthcare and yet very few are afforded this due to financial and resource constraints. It isn't unique to vulnerable groups but it stands to reason that they may need more intensive healthcare earlier on in their lives and questions about cost (not just financial cost) and benefit are raised earlier on.

Hitler and prisoners are irrelevant. We need to be able to have a sensible discussion without automatically mentioning the Holocaust every 5 as seconds or banging on about financial savings that could be made elsewhere. We need to be able to have focussed, nature discussion on this specific issue resorting to irrelevances.

Finance is relevant, but as a separate discussion.

Really? The label on my oramorph says I can take it as and when I need it. The slow release zomorph is twice per day.

You can self administer your morphine.

Administering drugs to somebody else is a whole other procedural process.

So can you list the specific topics that are allowed in this discussion?

If vulnerable people and financial issues are off the table and irrelevant, what are we allowed to discuss?

This sounds very distressing for you, but surely even you can see that your dad caused all this? He refused to get a diagnosis for your mum, then refused her appropriate care.
When it came to his own illness, he refused appropriate care for himself.

I haven't said vulnerable people and financial issues are off the table. This is literally what the discussion is about.

I simply suggested that Hitler and the Holocaust can't always be constantly referenced if we want to have a productive conversation about this topic. We also can't keep reasoning that because we have wasted public money on PPE, Rwanda, prisons etc that there simply must be an infinite supply of money to fund optimal healthcare for everyone. It is unrealistic and just acts as a distraction.

Money is artificial
It's a human concept originally designed to provide a type of exchangeable IOU for a service or goods

A society that can't afford to care for its elderly and dying isn't a society at all

What should we pay care home staff with? Thoughts and prayers?

Shame the title wasn't "to think that we need to have an honest conversation about euthanasia and human dignity and suffering"

Rather sets a different agenda.

Still I guess if money is that important to some people.

you absolutely did say that if people could not advocate for themselves then the decision should be made to end their lives. That is the part of your post I took umbrage with. .And as far as I can see no one is mentioning the holocaust every five minutes. In fact I was reluctant to add it into.my argument because people think.it is irrelevant and could never happen today.
Well just look at Canada for a start. It all starts off with noble lofty ideals but the goal posts are already being moved. The homeless and mentally ill are being given leaflets about euthanasia already and I was reading yesterday of a man who went into hospital and was left with a severe bed sore as he was left on a bed for 4 days without proper care . He was told it would be hard to heal and he was.then offered euthanasia . He took it as he was the kind of person who worried about being a nuisance . I would link.to it but I don't know how. It is being investigated at the moment.
Anyway that is the slippery slope in action and the alarm bells are already sounding loud and clear .

My mother and I have often talked about the idea of a life "with no point". She's in her mid-nineties, physically limited by age-related ailments. I have a very restricted, isolated life due to a chronic health condition. Both of us are in states we would, when younger, have deemed "not worth living". Both of us are happy. We had underestimated human adaptability, and overestimated the importance of vitality.

I think this is such a vital point. The decisions we make from within a mindset of youth and vitality can be so different when we find those things gone!

Two examples:

An elderly relative of mine was bed bound but still very much enjoyed life and enjoyed food. She was cared for by family and a rota of nurses some of whom didn’t seem to understand that for her, this was enough quality of life.

A friend of the family in his thirties had a form of cancer where the prognosis was not good and he made a series of advance decisions based on how he thought he would feel when certain capacities were gone. It turned out, when he reached that point, that he had very much changed his mind and very much wanted to live, despite not having the independence he thought he couldn’t live without.

But money is probably one of the main causes of human suffering in the world. Think how much pain could be stopped and lives saved if money was distributed differently. To pretend that it's somehow irrelevant to this discussion in bonkers.

If you had a set budget (which lets face it everyone, even the NHS does) how would you spend it to alleviate suffering and retain dignity? There isn't an easy or simple answer. It is fair and right to question enormous spending on a few when so many are in need.

I can't understand how it was allowed. These were not people with no mental capacity for the most part. You cannot, or should not, be allowed to put an adult in a facility and tell them they are never allowed to leave. That's not a care home it's a prison, it's forcible confinement.

These organizations, or perhaps the government who made recommendations, ought to have been used. But these elderly don't have the time, energy, or money to spend on that.

COVID for me made it clear that I would never want to allow one of my parents to go into a care facility.

Two things - there is a reasonable question with babies in general around, not euthanasia, but what interventions to go ahead with. So, not intervening to prevent death when that would be the natural result of certain problems.

It's often a judgement call even with adults what interventions do more harm rather than help, but so much trickier with babies. But the more interventions there are, the more we need to think about when to stop them. At certain point it can become kind of a violation of the body.

However, what I would say about euthanasia, or even assisted suicide, with the elderly is it will inevitably impact on the kinds of situations you mean. It's because it changes and legitimizes the idea that some lives are too painful to lead.

You can see how this has progressed in some countries that started with the principle that adults who are in full control of mental faculties should be able to choose when there is no hope. The underlying assumption there is that there are lives too painful or sad to live.

But you very quickly see people begin to say - well then, what about people who no longer have faculties? DO we leave them in such a life? Don't we have a duty of care to them? What about people in a life like that, but death is not immanent? Isn't that even worse?

In some countries what you see is a drip drip of removal of safeguards in the legislation. In others, once you admit that there is a "right" to end life, the courts begin to say that restricting this is illegal/non-constitutional. In all of them these groups "advocating" for more and more people to have access to assisted death seem to emerge to take it to the courts and lobby political representatives. In Canada, an advisory group of doctors said that assisted death should be expanded to include infants - because that ignores our duty of care to them.

People seem to think this kind of approach will remain a last resort thing that people are careful about, but once it becomes normative, that can change. There have been plenty of societies that did not support their elderly when resources were scarce - and this was seen as moral and good. We aren't;t immune to that kind of idea, once we open the door to it.

I think you have misplaced your anger here op. It sounds like your father's care was terribly managed. There were all kinds of places where decisions could have been made not to resuscitate, not to do a surgery.

Who was pushing/advising these things? If your father, that was up to him though maybe someone needed to tell him what the outcomes would really be. If the doctors, they were failing in their job.

But there should have been no need for euthanasia.

With regards to babies where do you draw your line? I had pre eclampsia so the natural thing would have for me to die still pregnant. That's,nature and possibly good for evolution as its survival of the fitness.

If I cut myself and bled out that's nature's,way.

If I had an infection that's nature's way.

If my teen got stabbed that's nature's,way to bleed out. But these are totally different situations. If your 15 and get stabbed you could be saved, then go and live a long productive life. If you have dementia you will never recover. You eill never get better. You could make a pre directive in your poa to make your own choices. The ill and young wouldn't and couldn't choose this.

Slso as a mum of three kids,with SEN two of them aren't like any mainstream peers. One will never be so. He is severely disabled so can he get popped off? Just keep the ones who turn out OK in mainstream?

We was talking about end of life with the OP. For elderly terminal people. If your 80 and have dementia or terminal cancer getting better is never an option. Dementia is basically your organ failure from old age in the majority of cases.

Agreed, but the point being made is that the one can lead to the other. It's all very well to say 'keep it to these boundaries', but it's a door that has been opened. And if you open a door just the tiniest crack, someone will want to open it a crack more. And someone else will say, 'OK, if we are doing this already, it's not unreasonable to do that.'. And a few years down the line, we have a post on Mumsnet saying, 'it's time to have an honest conversation about...'
The very fact that some people on this thread have mentioned some other things they think should be considered tells us what that door opens.
It isn't reasonable or fair to keep the door of ending suffering through dementia closed because of that, but I understand why it creates a stumbling block.

‘We was talking about end of life with the OP. For elderly terminal people’

And that is how the conversation started in Canada.

Shutting down debate by insisting that this is about elderly terminally ill people shows a real lack of acknowledgement of what is happening in Canada and how people who are far from elderly and/or terminally ill are being impacted.

All of you happily advocating for euthanasia for the old - I guess you're all quite young & inexperienced? Come back with more measured thoughts when you're 60.

Indeed, @Starlingexpress There are some very distressing & scary stories coming out of Canada - women with depression being "gently" pressured into euthanasia, for example.

I don't want euthanasia to be for anyone other than myself, should that need arise. I don't want other people of any age euthanised without their express, clear and multiply witnessed personal demand.

I've been qualified as a nurse for 45 years and I am absolutely furious that I have no say in how I want to end my life. I absolutely do not want to end up in a care home. I want euthanasia when I want it.
It's so backwards that we can give our pets a wonderful death to end suffering but not ourselves and the reasons against it are just not good enough.
I'm still working so I'm busy saving up the 20k plus it will cost me to go to Dignitas. but lots of people cannot afford that.
I have a do not resuscitate plan in place already but that isn't enough in my opinion.

I'd be quite happy in a care home as long as I could look around me and listen to books. It certainly wouldn't be deal breaker.

Actually I'm 62 and have witnessed hundreds of deaths during my NHS career, as a result I'll fight for euthanasia until my last breath.