Tone it done, people. No more personal comments.
I’ve undergone dental surgery without anesthesia before. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but I didn’t want to wait until I could have someone to drive me home afterward.
That being said, surgery is not analogous to death.
Sometimes it results in death though. In those cases where a patient dies during surgery while under anesthesia, were they cowardly for electing to go under and therefore not feel their death?
Its funny how God always has the same values we do. Suicide is stigmatized and also it leads to hell. However killing someone as a soldier, or killing someone on death row, or killing someone in self defense, or killing non-human life (all socially acceptable forms of murder) do not result in God sending you to hell. Homosexuality is a hellfire sin, but shellfish and divorce are ok.
I can’t remember who said it, some woman said a hundred years ago ‘I am wary of anyone who claims to understand Gods will as his will usually overlaps with their own’. I wish I could find the quote.
No. Their death is no fault of their own - they put their trust in a professional who let them down, and they’re not to blame that the professional screwed up.
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“She chose death over dying”.**…huh?
Let’s back off of the end-of-life issue for a moment and consider birth and pre-birth issues.
If you knew for a fact that your baby was going to be born with horrific defects (assuming it was born alive) that would cause it and you untold suffering and pain, only for it to die a short time later, would you still want it brought to term? Well, not everyone does, and they had to make a wrenching choice:
http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/Default.aspx
Smapti, do you spend a lot of time worried and frightened of the nothingness that existed before you were born?
Fuck that. I’ve got my advance directive laid out, and my parents had theirs too. Mom is still living; she and I and my brother honored my dad’s wishes as specified in the document. Why? Because it was his choice. It was what he wanted. The doctors are supposed to follow the choices made, and it’s no one else’s business.
This is one of the most maddening threads I’ve ever encountered on the dope.
I simply do not understand anyone calling this young woman a coward. I hope I can be as brave as she was if I am ever faced with such a terrible prognosis.
I mean, I could almost understand thinking you have an obligation to suffer IF you believe there is a God and you need to suffer because of your sins or something. But to believe there is nothing and yet you still need to suffer such misery is completely mind boggling to me.
I can barely even understand that mindset of “redemptive suffering.” It seems so pointless.
Not if existence is going to be a fucking nightmare.
It seems to me that the big nothingness I “experience” after I die will be a lot like the big nothingness I “experienced” before I was born.
Edit: dag-nabit! YogSosoth beat me to the point!
But in other places you’ve put avoiding personal risk before the chance of saving or improving the lives of others. So your obligation to self trumps your obligation to others. Wouldn’t an obligation to others over self entail also taking risks of being injured, permanently maimed or killed if the probability of maximizing life included you taking that risk? Sometimes your sense of duty to both living and improving the lives of others are in conflict. It can’t always be both.
I’m always surprised when people say suicide is cowardly. Killing oneself is extremely difficult, indeed it takes great courage. I could never do it. This veers OT, but most depressed people who commit suicide think they’re doing their families a* favor*; that their families will no longer have to deal with them and their depression. Wrong as it sounds to us, that’s carrying out what they perceive to be their familial obligation.
Back on-topic, Maynard was doing the same thing, sparing her family the horror of watching her die an excruciating death. She saw that as an obligation.
Yes, she was a very courageous woman.
It’s nuts when people think God wants someone to spend weeks or months lying in bed in total agony, but at least it has a simplistic sort of consistency to it. “God wants us to do crazy shit that makes no sense, but he’s God so why should we expect anything he wants to make sense to us mere mortals?” I can kind of sort of see how someone could believe that.
But Smapti’s position in this thread, which seems to be “Brittany Maynard owed us (the rest of humanity) a few more weeks or months of her suffering in hopeless agony, and how dare she deprive us of them?!” How the fuck can anyone seriously believe that?
An unborn baby is not yet a human life. It is a potential life. I have no issue with abortion.
Agony is only hopeless if you decide you want it to be.
What does that mean? Have you ever been seriously ill or injured? I have, and there isn’t any room for lofty thoughts of hope or hopelessness or making decisions. Pain is all there is.