Word: die
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...treated. "It doesn't take a genius to know that when you're in that amount of pain, you can either bear it or you can't," he says. "And I couldn't." He still resents the powerlessness of patients who are forced to live when they beg to die. "The physicians say that when a patient is in that much pain, he is not competent to make judgments about himself. It's the pain talking. And then when narcotics are given to subdue the pain, they say it's the narcotics talking. It's a no-win situation...
...life-at-all-costs heroics. Overtreatment of the terminally ill strikes physicians as both wasteful and inhumane. And patients living within sight of death often find themselves more concerned with the quality of the life that remains than with its quantity. Once reconciled to the inevitable, they want to die with dignity, not tethered to a battery of machines in an intensive- care unit like a laboratory specimen under glass...
...wanted only pain-killers. Her two grown sons supported her decision, but some friends urged that she battle on. "They said, 'Go for it at all costs,' but I had seen my father, my mother and several friends go through this." She preferred to stay at home to die, and summoned her Episcopal priest to administer unction. Nolan hopes she will leave a message for those considering decisions like hers. "I wish people wouldn't be frightened about knowing what they're up against. To have a part in my treatment has been so important. I'm part...
...when doctors cannot consult the patient directly, the issue becomes much harder. Karen Ann Quinlan's was the most celebrated right-to-die case before Cruzan's, and one that seems almost straightforward by comparison. In 1975, after she had been comatose for seven months, Quinlan's father went to the New Jersey Supreme Court to have her respirator turned off. The court agreed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider the case further. After the ruling, Quinlan lived nine more years breathing on her own. But Nancy Cruzan is not on a life-support system. Her parents...
...doctors and nurses are uncomfortable about withholding food and water, they are profoundly uneasy about actively assisting a suicide. Yet a seemingly / inexorable logic enters the picture: once it is acceptable to stand by and allow a patient to die slowly, why is it not more merciful to end life swiftly by lethal injection? What was once taboo is now openly discussed in academic journals: last March the New England Journal of Medicine published an article by twelve prominent physicians called "The Physician's Responsibility Toward Hopelessly Ill Patients." "It is difficult to answer such questions," the doctors wrote...