IN MY SHOES: He Wants To Live, Dammit!
A medical resident – we called her "Dr. Death" - at the Intensive Care Unit at Long Island's North Shore Hospital chased us down the hallway.
"Your husband wants to die," she told my mother, again. …
"He can't even talk," I reminded her.
"He motioned with his hands when we tried to put in the feeding tube," she said. …
Afflicted with asbestos-related lung cancer, my father,
A new resident appeared the next day, this one a bit more diplomatic but again urging us to allow my father to "die with dignity." And the next day came yet another, who opened with the words, "We're getting mixed messages from your family," before I shut him up. …
I complained … to my father's doctor, an Orthodox Jew, who said that his religion forbids the termination of care but that he would be perfectly willing to "look the other way" … [A] light bulb went off in my head. We could devise a strategy to fend off the death-happy residents: We would tell them we were Orthodox Jews. …
[I]t was as though an invisible fence had been drawn around my mother, my sister and me. No one dared mutter that hateful phrase "death with dignity."
Though my father was born to an Orthodox Jewish family, he is an avowed atheist … As I sat in the ICU, blips on the various screens the only proof that my father was alive, the irony struck me: My father, who had long ago rejected Orthodox Judaism, was now under its protection.
As though to confirm this, there came a series of miracles. Just a week after he was rushed to ICU, my father was pronounced well enough to be moved … into
On Father's Day, we packed my father's hospital room … "Life's not so bad, after all," the atheist said. I wanted to … find
It occurs to The Stiletto that discouraging family members from pursuing any and all reasonable life-saving treatment options so as to hasten the “dignified” death of a loved one – especially when the patient is elderly and “has already lived a full life” – is a subtle means of rationing healthcare. How else to keep Medicare costs from spiraling out of control once the baby boom generation begins enrolling in the program at age 65 (the first wave celebrated their 60th birthdays this year)?
Ironically, had these millions of fetuses lived to become productive citizens, the FICA taxes they would have paid into the Social Security and Medicare programs would have obviated the need for “reform” or for healthcare rationing.
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