Thread: Rant Thread II
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Old 01-09-2013, 07:30 PM   #7952
Miss Absynthe
 
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Hell, it's other people & both of them are you
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fruitbat View Post
And it's friggin' cruel watching someone slowly die of cancer. Why can't we put them to sleep instead of watching them suffer for days/weeks/months if there is no hope of remission?
Because a lot of people who have cancer aren't ready to die, even if they don't have a prognosis that included periods of remission.

Because we don't get to decide on whether their quality of life is adequate.

Because dying is a process that people move through, and to cut off that process before it's completed means that they might miss out on something that they want to experience.

What we need to be doing is making sure that while they are dying they aren't suffering. Symptom control for diseases like cancer is actually very easy to obtain and maintain - the problem exists when you have health systems that don't care about supplying the resources needed to dealing with symptoms because these people are just going to die anyways.

I worked as a palliative care nurse for 15 years.. I'm good at helping people die well. It's very much an achievable goal - it's just that a lot of people within health care don't think that it's a worthy goal.
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