Why do we (as a society) do this?

[Zoopet]

So I've just visited my Mum.(stage 4 Parkinsons)
She's in a very good care home and the staff are great.
She had another collapse during the week and was taken to hospital but tests revealed nothing and she was discharged back to the Care Home.
When I visited this morning she asked for the toilet and after the hoist was used and she had to be completely washed and reclothed due to horrendous diarrhoea I was asking myself why do we do this?
It's a miserable existence for her and due to her Parkinsons she has zero quality of life.
She's still convinced that her partner has gone off with someone else( he died from covid last year)
and we have the same conversations every visit.

No dignity just a terrible physical and mental decline.
I just feel utterly depressed.
I hate visiting but will continue to do so but God it is truly awful.
Just wanted to vent.

I was having this discussion with the lovely deputy care home manager at my darling mums care home last night on how awful it is to keep people alive when there is zero chance of recovery. Having watched my lovely mum having her nappy changed last night and trying to feed her when all she wanted to do was sleep was utterly heartbreaking. It's inhumane, cruel and undignified. I just want her to be at peace she's had enough. Something needs to change.

So sorry you are going through this, I agree, if you owned a pet and they were this poorly with no expectation of recovery, you would be facing cruelty charges. But if you are human, you just have to get on with it, how can that be right?

I'm planning on suicide. Though it will be very difficult as you can be unaware that your faculties are failing. Pills, cut wrists. Whatever.

It doesn’t have to be significant to give us pause. Similar to how sending innocent people to be hung when we had the death penalty there wasn’t a “significant” number of them but even the death of a few innocents was enough to abolish capital punishment.

Euthanising a person under duress/without their consent is essentially murder. There was a case of a woman in the Netherlands whose family decided to euthanise her. The woman had agreed in principle a few years that she might want euthanasia “when the time is right” but when asked directly in the lead up had said “not yet” or “I don’t want to die”. They went ahead with the euthanasia anyway and did not inform her, they drugged her tea without her knowledge. It didn’t put her fully to sleep and when they went to give her the injection, she kicked the doctor and started to struggle. The family members had to physically hold her down in order for the doctor to give the lethal injection. The courts cleared everyone of murder, but that case is very disturbing.

Surely there could be something in writing to say that if you reach the final stages of dementia you would be happy to be euthanized ?? I watch the awfulness and the misery and distress at my mums care home and think why are we allowing this to continue ??

I thoroughly agree. DNR seems only to apply to heart attacks, which require brutal intervention (breaking ribs etc). Pneumonia and so on can be treated, and so they are. Mil - demented to the point of no cognition at all, doubly incontinent, bed bound and simply wailing/mumbling, was sent to hospital three times for pneumonia. It was not only pointless but downright cruel.

I believe the Hippocratic oath is no longer fit for purpose due to medical advances. Modern drugs can prolong life far in excess of what is humane.

Sorry for your loss @Zoopet I’ve just seen you mum passed away yesterday.

I went to a funeral this week, a relatively middle aged woman, the grief was palpable, it was a unexpected and very quick death.

I'll take this route, even if it's today

Hereditary major dementia in my family. I'm not worried because I have carefully thought out plans for if/when I get that diagnosis. And I'm not the slightest bit suicidal - I'm very much enjoying my life right now. Which is precisely why it will NOT be ending the way my grandmother's did. I've seen it. Won't be me. Anyone who doesn't understand this has never seen the very end stages of Parkinson's with major dementia. I'm sure people on this thread have, so I won't elaborate to say it was as bad as those conditions can get before she finally died.

My mums best friend a very vivacious and lovely lady in her late 70's died very suddenly of a stroke a few years ago. Her family were of course devastated but for me this would have been preferable to seeing my mum in her living nightmare currently.

@BerthaLovelock completely agree, things have advanced so much medically, we need a major overhaul. Keeping people alive is great if they have quality of life but medicating end stage dementia patients is pointless to me and cruel, just let them go with dignity.

Not sure about suicide. What happens if you botch it and cause lasting injury to yourself on top of the dementia?

Taking a cold mechanistic view, murder is wrong, but so is torturing hundreds of thousands of people by keeping them alive with dementia against their will.

Condolences to @Zoopet
I suggest within a month you try to do something completely different to get the stress or grief out of your body. I wish I had when my mother passed away.
Thanks for opening a thread on this back in January, it's been helpful to get people to chip in with their comments.