I haven’t had time to watch the video or read any transcript of Obama’s recent health care townhall meeting. I need to do so, since that seems to be where my mother (or Fox News and others) have gotten the idea that Obama thinks we should put our old people on ice floes and send them to see with no health care. From the bits and pieces I have read, this is a terrible twisting of what was actually said.
As it turns out, he did, in fact, mention hip replacement surgery:
But the president questioned whether his now-deceased grandmother should have received her hip replacement while suffering a terminal illness.
Recounting the dilemma, Obama said, “(T)he question was, does she get hip replacement surgery even though she was fragile enough that they weren’t sure how long she would last (or) whether she could get through the surgery.”
“I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time,” Obama said.
“That’s where you get into some very difficult moral issues,” Obama said – specifically considering whether “in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.”
So, in addition to suggesting (as I posted earlier) that the elderly (and anyone else) who may not be a good candidate for some radical surgery perhaps not get said surgery due to age and/or unsuitability for it, he also questioned the wisdom of terminal patients already well into the process of dying should have massive surgeries not intended as life-saving measures. To me, this sounds intelligent. To my mother and others, it sounds like he wants to kill off old people. I still assume my mom got this idea from Fox News, since she doesn’t read news or blogs on the internet.
Just as I said before that I would be unwilling to undergo a radical surgery in my old age (or even younger) that wasn’t going to dramatically improve my quality of life for an extended period of time, if I am already dying from something else and my death is just over the horizon –no matter my age– I would not want to undergo a surgery for some other problem as I lay there trying to die with grace and in comfort.
But then, I am very matter-of-fact about such things, and quality of life has always been more important to me than the quantity of it. That likely comes from being the carrier of genes from one family who lives into very old age rather healthily until everything falls apart and death comes and one family who all died very young from various conditions. I might have 50+ years of good life left, or I may have a mere 20 or less. I have considered these kinds of medical thoughts at length, because I want to have a plan for what to do in the event I find myself needing to make tough decisions (or my family having to do so for me). More people should consider these things long before they find themselves in the position of having to think about them.
I need to find the time today to track down a transcript of the townhall meeting (it was on ABC, I think) and read it. Right now, I am getting all my information from news sources, and all of them seem to be skewed and biased. I’d rather read or hear what was said and come to my own conclusions.
My mother passed away in 2005 from complications of Alzheimer’s. Almost a year before she passed she fell and broke her hip and needed surgery, but her condition was so bad at the time of her fall they could do nothing, but treat her for the pain.
Our family faced the choice of letting her have the surgery and the fact that she might not survive the procedure or just keep her as comfortable as possible through meds. Just before she broke her hip she stopped eating due to Alzheimer’s and we had to make a choice to let her starve to death or let the doctors place a feeding tube in her abdomen. At that time we were told that she might last 6months to a year.
I know first hand how hard making choices can be and I understand in certain circumstances why sometimes difficult decisions have to be made in regard to medical procedures, cause and effect, and the end result.
Some choices are never the ones you ever want to have to make and even when you do make them you have to be sure it is for the good of the person whose health and life are in a terminal way and consider these choices from a standpoint far removed from emotional mistakes that can never be forgotten.
I’ve been in the position to make these decisions for others myself several times, and there’s nothing easy about it, but the emotions of the situations have to be pushed aside to let rational thought and what’s best for the person in question rule the process.
The last decision I had to make of this nature was for my dad, and though I spent years second-guessing myself, because I loved my dad like nothing else and didn’t want him to die — my emotions wanted to take control of that decision, I have ever regretted my decision on the matter. Had he regained consciousness (something which was a slim hope anyway) and lived some months or years lying in a bed in pain and hooked up to machines, he would have been bitter and angry and miserable with zero life quality and incapable of doing the things he loved to do. And had he never regained consciousness, what good would have done to keep him hanging on long after his body was ready to go. Both of those outcomes would have been nothing but selfishness and an inability to let go on my part. The end result would have still been the same. He was still well on the road to death, only he would have suffered significantly and longer than necessary.
Yes, these decisions are awful to make for ourselves or our family members, but they are the sorts of decisions that have to be made from the point of facts and rational thought. I would have done almost anything for my father to live just a little longer, but the one thing I would not do to achieve that was cause him needless pain and extend his suffering. It was better that I suffer years of doubt and sorrow than for him to go on dying slowly and being miserable and in pain every moment of whatever kind of life he might have gained had I chosen differently.
All any of us can do is make these decisions as rationally as possible full of heart and soul and concern for the one we love or ourselves.