So you didn’t give him additional morphine?
If I had the humane means/ability and I thought a loved one was in physical distress and dying anyway, I would help them leave this world. Maybe your dad wasn’t struggling.
Hospice told my dad a few weeks in advance if/when he got to some certain point and wanted morphine they’d give it to him and he basically wouldn’t come back. He got to a place where he couldn’t speak. He didn’t appear to be in pain but the hospice nurse asked him if he wanted the morphine and he was just able to give her a thumbs up. He died quietly the next day. I’m glad hospice didn’t put the administration of the morphine on us though.
Sincerely,
Debbie Downer
As an aside, forget the super bowl I’m thinking of starting a pool about Russia invading Ukraine.
Thinking on this today, for various reasons. This was really kind of one of those "perfect storm"/"if only a, b, c, ...x, y, and z hadn't happened, the Titanic would've missed the iceberg" things. In addition to my above-mentioned reasons, at the time I was a USMC communications officer. In that line of work, you get conditioned on the importance of getting things right. Either things won't work or the consequences of not doing things exactly to the letter are too high to get intentionally violate something. Man-pack short range radios frequency-hop on a pseudo-random algorithm. If you don't have the clock on the radio set to the right time, you can't talk to anyone on the network because your radio isn't ever on the same frequency. On top of that, if you don't have the right crypto loaded, you're not talking to anyone. If you're doing a multichannel UHF shot and the send and receive antennas aren't pointing right at each other, with line-of-sight, and at the same elevation, you aren't talking to anyone. If you lose or mishandle CLASSIFIED materials there's a good chance your career is over and you may even go to jail. So there's powerful conditioning that if someone tells you "do this this way," you do it that way. Add in that I'm a guy and guys aren't notoriously good at reading between the lines. Then, on the other side of things, there were a number of reasons my Dad wasn't just going to say "I want to die, just help me to die." I can only suppose at them, but I will say Catholicism has a pretty heavy burden on suicide. But probably more importantly, he may have been trying to protect us. He may have wanted to spare me from knowing for the rest of my life that I intentionally killed him. Or that maybe insurance or pensions wouldn't pay out if it was an intentional overdose. Who knows?
Over the years I came to realize some of this, so when my Mom was in the final stages of pancreatic cancer I'd decided on what should be done. Only this time they didn't give us morphine. They gave us...what was the stuff Rush Limbaugh was addicted to for awhile? Oxycodone? I think Oxycodone. I didn't know enough about Oxycodone and wasn't about to go into the local library, where I could get Internet, and Google "how much Oxycodone is lethal?" On top of that, my Mom wasn't my Dad. My Mom was very controlling and uncompromising. She had to be in charge--even when she wasn't able to anymore. That's a whole other story. But the point is, any pill I gave her, I was subjected to a grilling: "What's that? Why are you giving it to me? Is the dosage right? What does it do? Etc." Also, she was more afraid to die than wanting to end the suffering. I have no idea why she was so afraid of dying, but she sure was.
OK. The "various reasons" is that we're about a month out from the anniversary of the death of my dog and I find myself bawling my head off over that all over again today--and wondering why that upset me so much more than losing a number of important humans in my life. But again, that's another topic for another thread. And I've got weekend chores I should be doing anyway.
And yeah, we're living in the montage from the beginning of "Idiocracy" at this point.
