Take medicine #1. It has a 5% chance of extending your life an average of 3 months. Of the 5% who live longer, they average 2.5 of those 3 months in an ICU in intractable pain.
-or-
Take medicine #2. It relives pain but does not extend your life.
-or-
Take medicine #3. It is phase I of a clinical trial. It is not expected to extend your life. Results may lead to developments that might help others who develop the same illness you are suffering from. You cannot take palliative relief at the same time you are on this experimental medicine so you will experience pain from your condition.
… and so on.
Many end of life decisions evaluate quality of life vs quantity.
It happened to me, once. My toddler had fallen off the couch and cut his scalp on a metal toy. I called the doctor, and described the injury very precisely. He told me “scalp wounds usually heal well, don’t come in.” So I didn’t. A week or two later my son went to the doctor with the ugly sore still oozing a little, and the doctor berated me for not having brought him in when it happened. “Usually we like to put a couple of stiches in a wounds like that.”
I was in my 30s, and a responsible professional.
I think the doctor just didn’t believe my careful, accurate description, and divided all my numbers by 2 or something. I wonder, if his dad had called, if he would have been told to bring the child in. My son still has a large, ugly scar, although right now his hair is too long for it to show.
A few years late my daughter had a similar wound on her forehead. It was a weekend evening, so I needed authorization to take her to the emergency room. I got a very similar run-around (admittedly, from the insurer, not the doctor) but this time I argued more vigorously, based on my prior experience, and she ended up with a dozen tiny stitches. The wound healed quickly and cleanly, and there is almost no scar.
You yourself Godwinized the thread by bringing up the Holocaust, claiming that that’s what happens when people decide some lives are more valuable than others. I was turning it back at you, asking if there’s something unique about the Holocaust and uniquely valuable about its victims. There are many other cases where one tends only to hear about one set of victims, as others are apparently less worthy.
If we’re talking about suicide, sure it is. We’re talking about one’s own life. Who else possesses it?
People on death row might need organs too you know. How would you solve that one? Put them in a lottery for organs along with innocent people, because everyone’s life is worth exactly the same? But I thought you said that those on death row **do **deserve to die?
Option one: Draw straws for the new heart. Long straw’s lucky day.
Option two: Plug known data into an anonymized equation and get a number out the other side indicating probable long term survival chances of the candidate.
How is the first more fair or preferable than the second? A person isn’t making the decision, only relaying the results. Under either option.
Because, apparently, according to Smapti, one second of a sick old man’s life is worth exactly the same as 60 years of an otherwise healthy young person’s life, even if the sick old man is only sick because he spent decades deliberately ruining his health while the young person is blameless. I don’t see the point in arguing with a perspective like that. Just thank God Smapti isn’t running things.
He should go to China where they sell transplant organs to the highest bidder.
Funny how the US is such a capitalism country where the poor get no health care:eek: but people who have money get health care!! And if you have lots of money you get better health care than other people and get to the front of the line!! Yet if you have million dollars you cannot buy transplants organs.
So funny.
Well China is not 100% capitalism country.
There is underground market of transplants organs but that is really not safe. Do you trust them being good doctor or know what they are doing.
Smapti, what about a pet? If you have a dog, or a cat that’s sick or in pain, is it okay to put that pet to sleep? Have you ever faced this decision, and if so, what did you do?
Ten years ago my cat got sick. Without treatment, his condition would have been fatal within a few days, and I couldn’t afford the treatment he needed. I chose to have him euthanized. To this day I hate myself for letting him down and I can’t even type about it now without getting teary-eyed.
My current cat is 9 years old and still thinks he’s a kitten. I don’t know what I’ll do if and when he starts to show his age.
Smapti, I think the point being argued is that, if you have a heart for transplant and someone who will probably live five years with a transplant and die in six months without one, you should transplant the heart and not throw it in the garbage. Because five years of life is better than six months of life.
If you agree that that’s the case - five years of life is better than six months - the logic of that agreement means that you ought to transplant the heart into someone who probably will live five years longer than someone else who will probably die sooner.
The question of who deserves what doesn’t enter into it - the only factor is how many years of useful life you can get out of a heart. If the kid in the OP didn’t take his meds or cooperate with his treatment, but was otherwise a saint who did wonderful unpublicized work for lost kittens, he still should not have received a heart transplant ahead of someone who cooperated with treatment but was otherwise just another schmuck with a bad ticker.
The part about how the kid died committing robbery and assault is not quite a red herring, but it is close. He fucked up in a variety of ways, and as a result the remaining useful years of his transplanted heart were wasted.
The rules that were set up to decide who gets the heart and who gets sympathy are far from perfect, but they are intended to ensure that the scarce resource of transplantable hearts are made as much use of as is possible.
It’s not “who is a good person and who isn’t”. It’s “who’s likely to get the most use of the heart”. And someone who doesn’t take his meds and doesn’t comply with the treatment regimen is less likely to get the same amount of use as someone else who does and who does.
You shouldn’t skip to the front of the line because you got your picture in the paper over a sob story. That leads to wasted hearts, even if the recipient dies in much less spectacular ways.
Life ain’t fair. Sometimes somebody has to make a decision that nobody wants to or “should” have to in some perfect version of this universe. You can cry about it until your tears run dry, but that won’t change the reality of the situation.
Does someone have the right to decide whether to transplant the heart vs. discarding it? ISTM that if you decide “yes, it’s better to transplant the heart vs. not using it”, the rest of the logic follows.
And it is good to see from your kindness to your cat, that when it comes down to it, you do know how to be compassionate, even if you don’t call it that to yourself. Maybe that even makes it more praiseworthy - you don’t even get the benefit of feeling that you did good, and yet you did it anyway.