Are we wanting immortality?

[MsHeffaPiglet]

It's sad that people in care homes have died.

Does it matter whether they died because of cornavirus, rather than a general infection, from a fall, from a stroke or a heart attack or just old age?

If you are 80, 85, 90 or 95, isn't waking up each day a blessing. Does someone of that age expect or want to live forever?

I understand that you want to spend the last moments with loved ones and that is the cruellest thing with coronavirus and the need to isolate from everyone.

However, I just don't understand the shock, horror at the fact that elderly people in care homes have been affected so much. Is it so surprising?

... and sorry, back to the point, the idea of treating any contraction of Covid that he might have got post-diagnosis as a "tragedy" is ridiculous to me. It's all death, it's all ceasing to breathe.

This isn’t a call for eugenics or genocide or an attempt to create some kind of Logan’s Run future where once you hit a certain age you’re euthanised. The elderly aren’t a distinct minority group, they’re a group most of us will join one day. This is as much as anything else a discussion about our own futures and our rights when we get old.

"This is as much as anything else a discussion about our own futures and our rights when we get old."
This. It's about people having the choice to decline treatment. If we (as individuals) can legally decline certain treatments (before you get dementia etc of course), then we can avoid the utter suffering that many of us have witnessed family members go through. I do not want to go through what my mum went through, and I want declining treatment to be my right. It's nothing to do with euthanasia.

Or eugenics!

If eugenics was a social and medical experiment, is artificial prolonging of life an equal social and medical experiment? At a certain point should nature take its course, with palliative care medicine and tlc? Is a comfortable death less difficult than intrusive medical and surgical intervention for short term gain?

Well posted minitheminx.

I watched my grandmother go through this and my mother always said that we should kill her rather than let her suffer in the same way. No such option was available and I had to watch my mother suffer the same awful fate. I am hoping that by the time I reach that age other options will be available.

Nursing homes are businesses, some of them very profitable and 82% of care home beds in the UK are privately owned. It is in the care homes profit interests to keep patients alive no matter what their quality of life is and increase their client base. There are 450,000 people in care homes and most of the cost of this is picked up by the taxpayer via the local council. With an ageing population this will cease to be affordable as at an average cost of £50k pa every extra 10,000 patients costs half a billion a year to fund. Outside of London and the South East seizing patient's homes only pays for a short time in a care home. It is this that gives me hope that other options will be investigated and offered.

I'm pretty shocked at the people saying it's in the interests of care homes to keep people alive whether they have good quality of life or not. For one thing, the staff are not (generally) medical experts, they are carers, and they care for the residents, they don't make medical decisions. But seriously, what else do you think they should they do? Kill them?

For those people believing pneumonia is a painful death, it usually isn't at least not in the cases I have witnessed. I hope that might comfort some relatives, because I think it must be unbearably painful to not be able to say goodbye.

Pneumonia used to be called 'the dying man's friend' because it was considered a relatively easy death.

I'm not in the UK, but I know people here find it difficult to get nursing home placements, or residential care. Demand is higher than supply - so I don't think people are kept alive to hang on to the fees.

My understanding is that Pneumonia can be an easy death if drugs are administered to keep the patient comfortable. With reports that some GP's are not attending care homes I would imagine that some people are being denied this 'easing'

My sister , in her early 50's, is in a nursing home due to ms .She's not the youngest in the home, there are several others with acquired brain injuries. They sit among 80year olds+ all day because there's no other home for them .It's totally inappropriate for them and the lack of any other appropriate care may now have even more serious implications for them.
Perhaps the op should visit some homes and become acquainted with the residents.

GPs are prepared to prescribe during telephone or video consultations, though. They've been doing that for me, thankfully. They never used to do that ever, but it's a case of needs must at the moment, I think.

I think that is a very important point, Griselda. I really hope this whole sector is examined and redeveloped in the months ahead.

For the record, it is possible to have experienced elderly family members dying in awful care homes of horrendous diseases and STILL to find the tone of some of the comments on here disturbing.

There's a world of difference between being aware of quality of life issues for some elderly people with some conditions, and jumping from that to seeing mass deaths of people in care homes as not worth avoiding, or somehow silly to express shock or regret over.

I agree with whoever said that from a disability perspective it's all a bit familiar. Just be careful about protecting too much of your own feeling of "I'd rather be dead than live like that" on to other people en masse (rather than looking at people as individuals). It's easy to drift into inappropriately classifying entire groups of people as probably better off dead based on something about them like age, or a particular kind of disability, or the fact that they live in a care home. It's a callous oversimplification. As a society we shouldn't be talking about any group like that.

Hmm, more good points.

Maybe we drift into these inappropriate classifications because we are so shielded from death and therefore our only experience tends to be that of our grandparents or parents end of life?

eeeyoresmiles I agree, but I go back to my earlier point. No-one seems to have asked the elderly in care homes what they want. They have been infantalised and had choice removed. Those who still have capacity want to be able to choose the way they live, and die.

seeing mass deaths of people in care homes as not worth avoiding, or somehow silly to express shock or regret over

I really don't think anyone on here is saying that. Many of us have relatives in care homes right now and our primary concern is for their well-being (both mental and physical). Shutting down conversation with statements like "this is disturbing" is exactly what prevents people from having a considered, thoughtful discussion about quality vs quantity of life. We don't talk about it because we're scared of accidentally saying the wrong thing or being taken the wrong way. Many people on this thread have shared incredibly upsetting and personal stories about their own loved ones in their last stages of life. The idea that they somehow don't care about old people dying is completely unfair.

While I agree that our society puts too much emphasis on prolonging older peoples lives at the expense of their dignity and comfort, I’ve also found some of the posts on this thread utterly chilling.

It’s one thing to advocate for a more humane approach to euthanasia ie at the informed request of someone who’s experiencing unbearable suffering.

It’s a very different thing to hint that treatment for cancer or heart disease should be denied patients in their 70s or even that living wills/euthanasia should be compulsory because elderly people cannot possibly enjoy life, regardless of what they may claim.

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”the thought of being an ongoing burden to my family is awful, we need a better system of living wills being seen as thing right thing to do etc”

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“old people face tremendous pressure to pretend that seeing/having grandchildren is somehow "enough" to justify their continued life.

........I adore my children but wouldn't want to be forced to pretend I wanted to carry on living.”

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“What's unnatural is intervening with nature's decline and keeping people alive well beyond what their bodies and minds can cope with. I feel so sorry for people who have been cured of cancer or heart disease in their seventies only to spend their eighties confused and distressed with Alzheimers.”

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“I feel a lot of people who write about the ‘shame’ of not giving the elderly the same respect as the young are very young themselves...

They may have a ‘sweet’ old grandparent whom they visit from time to time and who actually protects them from the indignities and troubles of old age by putting on a brave smile and pretending to enjoy life.“

...............................................................

“I don’t believe most people in homes have a great quality of life, especially given how much they cost.......

... I hope euthanasia becoming legal gets considered ASAP and also that people will now consider looking after relatives at home themselves“

.............................................................

Some of these posts read as though they’re attempting to normalise the concept of living beyond your late 60s as both unnatural and undesirable.

And that euthanasia should become routine for older people regardless of their own protestations about wanting to live.

The decision should perhaps be taken out of their hands because it would be a kindness to release them from the ”indignities and troubles of old age”. After all, they’re only hanging on because they’re forced to pretend for the sakes of others, that their lives are bearable.

It feels as though the Overton window regarding medical care for older people (including those in later middle age) and forced euthanasia is beginning to shift

I'm not shutting down the conversation or saying that talking about people suffering is inappropriate. Or trying to take away choice from people. Those are both straw men. The issue is some people using "people who live in care homes" as a lazy shortcut for "people who are suffering in the end stages of their life", as justification for talking about mass deaths in care homes being less shocking or mattering less than the mass deaths of other hypothetical groups of people. The fact is that those two groups do not neatly coincide. If a care home loses half its residents in a week to a pandemic illness, that is a serious and shocking thing to have happened, full stop. It might not be something we could have avoided, but that doesn't mean we should just dismiss it based on lazy generalisations that residents are all probably better off dead anyway.

The subject of how to make the lives and deaths of people with serious conditions better, in and out of care homes, is a valid topic for discussion, but a different one.

I can't see how any of these comments could be considered 'chilling'. Death is a kindness for many (not all) old people.

The point is that the 'not all' in your post matters, and is the reason why we shouldn't be generalising about groups.

The problem is the generalising.

It reminds me of the discussions about letters being sent from a GP surgery to entire settings saying every resident should sign a DNR. People rightly objected, because even if 98% of residents would benefit from a DNR (but then most should already have one, if they haven't already), the 2% would matter too. The problem is generalising and saying "you live in this residential setting - you need to sign a DNR and agree to getting less treatment, regardless of your individual situation".

Whenever an objection is raised to that kind of blanket generalisation, the response seems to be a story of how a frail 90 year old wouldn't benefit from resuscitation, how brutal it is and so on. That's not the point - objecting to the blanket treatment doesn't mean someone thinks the opposite should happen, and everyone in care homes should have CPR and never have DNRs.

I find the idea of being very old, in pain and in distress and in a care home frightening. Who wouldn't? We need to do whatever we can to make people's lives (and deaths) better. But I also find the idea of being caught up in a blanket decision about what care is appropriate for me based only on my age or disability status (and on what a lot of younger people think they might feel like at that age) frightening. Generalising is not appropriate.

It reminds me of the discussions about letters being sent from a GP surgery to entire settings saying every resident should sign a DNR. People rightly objected, because even if 98% of residents would benefit from a DNR (but then most should already have one, if they haven't already), the 2% would matter too. The problem is generalising and saying "you live in this residential setting - you need to sign a DNR and agree to getting less treatment, regardless of your individual situation".

It's unethical in the extreme to pressure anyone into signing a DNR, but I suspect the point is that very few of those who are asked would be considered clinically fit for extreme interventions. Which sort of leads me to believe that it's to spare doctors from having to make more of these decisions than they have to.

As for this "Some of these posts read as though they’re attempting to normalise the concept of living beyond your late 60s as both unnatural and undesirable.".

Wow, offensive much?

Some people are good at reading meanings well beyond what anyone was at all likely to have intended. It can make having a serious discussion about serious issues more difficult and sometimes (not always, by any means ... if the cap doesn't fit don't wear it) smacks of a sort of virtue signalling.

I will get my pension at 66, unless it is moved again, so I'd quite like a few years to spend my children's inheritance. But if I was being nursed, kindly, in a nursing home, near the end of my life, I'd prefer to be looked after rather than treated pointlessly.