Join me at the State House to oppose Physician Assisted Suicide in Vermont

[nancyd]

Dear Friends,
I was shocked and appalled to see that Vermont Legislators are actually putting forth proposed legislature to allow Physician Assisted Suicide here in Vermont. There are no words to describe my disgust and anger at such an abominable action.

I am a registered nurse who has spent nearly my entire nursing career on caring for the terminally Ill. I am the author of a book entitled Mind, Body, and Soul; A Guide to Living with Cancer. I have cared for Over 400 terminally Ill people. I can tell you with certainty,
If a person wants to end their life due to suffering a progressive life-threatening condition, it is because we have failed as medical professionals, spiritual and social counselors, and family members. Human nature is universally endowed with an inherent need for survival. It is only when suffering becomes too difficult to bear, that thoughts of suicide become the only viable option of escape.

We must not allow OUR FAILURES  due to incompetence, neglect, apathy, and fear, to be the deciding factors of whether or not this State will allow assisted suicide. LIFE IS SACRED.

Instead, we must fight to preserve their inherent will to live. We must take responsibility for ensuring that every person has adequate pain management, spiritual and social support to preserve their dignity.

Join me at the State House in Montpelier on Wednesday, at 9am to OPPOSE Physician Assisted Suicide in Vermont.

Nancy Hassett Dahm, RN,BSN
Fairfax, Vermont

[mirjo]

I can tell you with certainty,
If a person wants to end their life due to suffering a progressive life-threatening condition, it is because we have failed as medical professionals, spiritual and social counselors, and family members.

Really? It couldn't be because it's a personal choice?

I fully appreciate your position, I too am an RN and have cared for a fair share of terminal patients  and while there are some who are still "well enough" to move around have expressed a will to live (even when there was no chance) I have honestly never met a dying person with no quality of life who wouldn't have been happy to just peacefully take their last breath.

We must not allow OUR FAILURES  due to incompetence, neglect, apathy, and fear, to be the deciding factors of whether or not this State will allow assisted suicide. LIFE IS SACRED.

I don't consider allowing someone making a decision about his or her own life a failure on my part. I also don't consider any care I have given to be incompetent, neglectful, or apathetic to any dying patient I've ever had. What I have learned is that people are often restless unless  medicated for comfort and if that's the case, they aren't lucid. The Life is Sacred tag line indicates a religious bent to your position. I'm just guessing, but it seems a logical  conclusion.

I obviously feel as strongly in support of this--as a matter of patient choice as you do against it. I have listened/researched to both sides in depth and do not come to my decision without considerable consideration.

[nancyd]

I don't consider allowing someone making a decision about his or her own life a failure on my part. I also don't consider any care I have given to be incompetent, neglectful, or apathetic to any dying patient I've ever had

Thank you for commenting. I appreciate your comments. The failures I speak about concern many in terms of physicians not knowing how to to prescribe adequate pain medication..I have seen this time and again. That makes them incompetent. Many have shown apathy towards a patient's suffering. Palliative care requires constant attention to the comfort needs of the patient. My position on this comes with first hand experience, like yours. It has nothing to do allowing someone to make a choice. What I am referring to is that our failures push patients into a hopelessness frame of mind. We all know terminal patients will die. They know as well. But they still want to have comfort and a sense of meaning at the end. This is difficult to achieve in every case. Everyone is responsible; spiritual care, social workers, nurses, physicians, family members.  You know this to be true.

When I say Life is sacred, yes I am a Christian,but life is sacred as part of the human condition, not only in terms of our faith values. You and I have worked hard to preserve the dignity of dying patients, and so have many, many other healthcare professionals. But we are lacking in a unified, systematic approach that optimizes full mind, body, soul care. If a patient wants physician assisted suicide, WE Have Missed Something. It's our job as healthcare providers to find it and fix it.

[slpott]

I have no health care experience nor do I have a terminal issue but I will say this. If I was dying and close to it, I would rather go to sleep quietly and less painful on my loved ones than to hang in there to the bitter end and lose all dignity and grace. Sometimes your last days are not the way loved ones would like to remember you and you are so sick that you don't even know what is going on anyway. If the pain is so bad that the doctors are having a hard time easing it, isn't it more effective to say good-buy. I personally would not want to suffer through when the end result is the same.  I also do not want to see my loved ones in that much pain. I think you should be able to make your own choices. Not the state nor the government.

[Thor]

Slpott.... well said!!!!!

Mirjo.... mark this day on the calender.... we have agreed on something!

[nancyd]

This issue will always be a hot topic for debate, and there is nothing "bad" about that. It is a very complicated matter. There are many variables associated with the dying process. There are many misconceptions and misinformation associated with dying as well. Pain can be well controlled over 90 percent of the time. This is fact based on the literature, and my own experience. Most cancer patients or others with a terminal illness do not die in excruciating pain or much pain at all. Yes, it is sometimes a struggle to die at the very end, but it is not from physical pain.  It is a natural struggle to be born...we don't remember....but our mothers do.

The best thing we can do for ourselves or our family member, if and when we are faced with a prognosis of 6 months or less, is to get on a hospice or palliative care program. These healthcare professionals are experts in the care of people and their family members.
If anyone wants to learn about cancer care or how to care for a loved one. You can have a FREE copy of my book, Mind, Body and Soul; A Guide to Living with Cancer ( it's for any terminal condition).

Nancy

[rod anode]

we put animals to sleep and call it humane,im just sayin..but the minute you expect the taxpayers to pay for it thats where I have a problem with it ....hell you want to go out and marry a goat? have at it .but dont expect me to put your kids through school

[nancyd]

But Rod....we are putting the kids through school....through our school taxes.

[mirjo]

Thor--noted in bold ink!

nancyd--I'm going to respectfully disagree, because I don't want to dis your duties as a hospice nurse and fully appreciate the temperament it takes to be in that field. I also believe there is a place for it, but only to a point. I have to admit that I have never felt good about injecting morphine into my dying patients (be it from cancer, kidney failure, or simply old age) to keep them "comfortable," while family members sit around helplessly. I don't have the numbers behind me that you do, but enough to know how I feel about it. I agree that dying can be a struggle for some, call it restlessness, pain, or whatever, it's an obvious discomfort of some sort. We medicate to comfort, which essentially keeps the actively dying sedated and quieted. This is the lauded palliative care, along with the turning and keeping them clean. I don't feel I can advocate for more of this, as the only option, in the later stages of dying.

It's unconscionable to consider ending a person's life and I don't think I could personally do it--even if someone begged me, but I do feel strongly that it's a personal choice and if someone (myself included) decides they want to check out before they reach that morphine-stupor stage, I don't think it should be anyone else's  decision. That said, when the time has come, people have chosen not   to take the medication prescribed. I think it has a psychological affect in that there is a comfort in just  knowing  you can make that choice if you want to, but don't have to. There's a lot to be said about having control over your own situation. I think Ed would agree with that.

Ed--I agree that we put animals down to be humane and ironically won't allow ourselves to make a choice about whether or not to end our own life when we are in fact dying. One other thing: The public school system is the biggest Socialist program there is and it wasn't invented by Obama, Sanders, or Shumlin.

[Chris Santee]

submitted to the Fairfax News:

“First, Do No Harm”
By Edward Mahoney
 
In medical school, all physicians are taught as a First Principle “primum non nocere,” or “First, Do No Harm.” The hundreds of Vermont physicians and nurses who comprise most of the membership of the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare are convinced that the act of writing a prescription so a patient may commit suicide is fundamentally inconsistent with this principle and thus with the ethical practice of medicine.

This week the Judiciary Committee of the Vermont Senate is hearing testimony on S. 103, the latest version of a determined attempt by a national organization to use the Vermont Legislature to overturn “primum non nocere,” or at the very least re-interpret it to the point of being meaningless.

The Vermont way of caring for and supporting one another does not include assisting someone in the act of suicide. The excellent physicians and nurses who labor long for the welfare of their patients do not include a prescription for death among their duties. Vermont has an excellent system of both palliative care and hospice care available to patients throughout the state. We are becoming a national leader in that area, and VAEH has actively supported these efforts.

The VAEH encourages the Legislature to likewise “do no harm” to the many Vermonters at the end of life who need to know that their healthcare providers – their very link to life and comfort and dignity – are not compromised by any capacity to deliver death. End of life care is a co-operative process involving the patient, family, and healthcare providers. If even one link in the chain is empowered to enable the patient’s suicide, the potential for abuses becomes widespread. Here are just three:

·  Elderly Vermonters suffer from a relatively high incidence of elder abuse, according to the state’s social workers. Could the “option” of assisted suicide become a tool in the hand of the abuser?

·  Depression among end-of-life patients is widespread but often difficult to diagnose. It is, however, relatively simple to treat. Our resources would be better directed at treating end of life depression with effective, compassionate care, rather than with a lethal dose.

· Vermont’s healthcare insurance system is undergoing radical change. The state’s insurance commissioner was quoted in an Addison County newspaper last year as saying that cost-control of end-of-life treatment, including coverage for treatment, would have to become a greater priority. Although he has subsequently denied these statements, every thinking, informed Vermonter realizes that in the new state-run health care insurance system, the State of Vermont will be under extreme pressure to reduce costs in the most expensive areas of medical care – which, of course, includes end-of-life care as well as care for the severely disabled and chronically ill. In the State of Oregon, where assisted suicide is already legal, there have been several reports of end-of-life patients being denied payment of permitted medical expenses, but being offered full coverage for medication to end their lives by suicide.

VAEH members who are health care professionals also view with alarm any unintentional message that this legislation would send to Vermonters who are at-risk for suicide. Even if this bill could safeguard Vermonters at end-of-life from potential abuses – which it can’t – it cannot possibly keep suicide-prone Vermonters from thinking that the State of Vermont agrees that when life gets too hard, it’s okay to end it all.

The VAEH urges concerned Vermonters to leave a message for their state senators at the Vermont Statehouse during working hours at (802) 828-2228.

(Dr. Edward Mahoney is President of the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare and is a professor at St. Michaels College.)

[Chris Santee]

One thing I noticed, that there are no comments on:

Doctors can be wrong !
My birthmom, Marcia Lou Sweeney Santee, was given six months to live (cancer) when I was in second grade.
I barely remember that day.

I do remember the six enjoyable YEARS that she lived after that day.
And I cherish each and every day.
The trips to the beach, the picnics, the school plays with mom in the audience.

[Shadylane08]

I personally think its a little funny or maybe ironic that the medical field gives patients the choice of DNR / DNI (Do Not Resuscitate, Do Not Intubate, meaning in somecase choosing if you live or pass) but they wont give you this choice?  I fully believe that the only people that should have a say in the outcome of your own life is yourself and your maker whoever that is.

Chris I'm glad that the doctors in your and your mothers case were wrong and you were able to share years of pleasant memories with her before she graduated to the next step, but what would you have thought or what would your last 6 months of memories be if the doctors were right?

In the time leading up to my grandfathers passing (cancer), it was a little stomach turning when he didn't remember who his own family was, or always talked about his sister had been visiting him (His sister had been dead for probably 10 years)  I ask is this a good way to end your life?

I understand this is a very sensitive subject and people will be at opposite ends of the spectrum here but my stance is quality of life, not quantity, and personal Choice.  The only people that need to be involved in what I do with my life is me and my family.  I would never want my wife, or my future family to go through their husband or father not knowing who they were.

[nancyd]

Chris,
You are right! Sometimes physicians "get it wrong" in terms of predicting how long a "terminal" patient has left to live. I have personally had patients  live more than a year. The average was 2 months. And yes, I have read about patients who survived years after being given a prognosis of 6 months. I have also read that 4% of end-stage patients walk out of Calvary Cancer hospital CANCER FREE....due to faith and prayer. Sometimes physicians are wrong. Same is true for coma patients.

Good point, Chris.
Nancyd

[rod anode]

The public school system is the biggest Socialist program there is and it wasn't invented by Obama, Sanders, or Shumlin.
'SIGH'  NO but they contribute to the decay ,.nancy sorry you didnt get that last part

[Counselor]

I find "forced life" a much more difficult concept to wrap my head around than "death with dignity". It is my life, please let me live it how I choose.

Seems kinda morose to chuckle at something said on this thread, but Rod, I did "get it".