I feel you. My grandmother has had dementia for the past few years, so kind of the opposite problem. She is still pretty OK physically, but mentally she is just gone. It’s terrible to watch her just fade away like this. And the moments of clarity she does have (which are getting fewer and fewer) are even worse in a…

That was my first thought, too. Being in a coma with a traumatic injury is not the same thing as having a persistent terminal illness. Removing life support does not equal assisted suicide.

I’m so sorry that you are having this experience. Watching helplessly as someone you love slips away into oblivion is a truly transformative experience. You are in the midst of the pain and heartbreak right now, and your profound loss is evolving every day. My hope for you is that at some point in the future, you will…

I’m so sorry for both of you. Seeing someone you love suffering is the worst thing imaginable. My dad died from lung cancer in 2002. He was diagnosed in August 2001 and died in March 2002. He went through the standard chemotherapy, each round getting sicker and weaker. In Feb. he was hospitalized and ended up having a…

ALS is a horrific disease, one of my best friend’s mothers recently passed from it and was in the same state as your mother. My friend said she felt horrible to say it, but it was a blessing that her mother was gone. Because she’s not suffering anymore, and neither is her family. I hope your mother and your family…

I’m sorry to hear about your mother. My grandma was diagnosed with ALS this past year and deteriorated very quickly. As an Oregon resident, she was able to make the decision to end her life a couple of months ago and, even though I miss her every day, I’m glad she had that option, because she could no longer move or…

*hug*

That is the problem. For someone with something like Motor-Neurone Disease (ALS) they will be gaining every moment of life they can before wanting it to end but by the time they want it to end they are incapable of doing it. Giving people the decision only to commit suicide before they are ready or live months of hell…

I’m so sorry about your mom. I fully agree with the right to die. It seems ludicrous to me that it is seen as human to put down an animal in pain but we cannot let adults with terminal illnesses and severe medical conditions decide to end their own lives.

And, at BEST, she wants anyone who ends up in such a horrible condition to wait around staring at the ceiling and wearing diapers for the 1 in a million chance the doctors are wrong, instead of the 999,999 in a million chance they are right.

As usual, god gets all credit for the recovery but bears no responsibility for the accident/illness that afflicted the person in the first place.

I have seen someone languish for 25 years. I grew up with that person wishing for death, but I was too young and immature to understand what he was going through, too young and immature to see that **I was the one who did not want him to go**. As an adult now, I am relieved, for his sake, that he finally passed -…

Read up, don’t just regurgitate out-of-context cherry-picked sound bites. “non-voluntary” refers to poeple, say, in extended comas. You can hardly “volunteer” to be euthanized is you’re brain-dead now can you?

You really wanted to respond to that very personal anecdote about a relative’s unimaginable suffering with “hurr durr you must be fun at parties”?

I was going to post the same thing.

Please. How often do you think this happens? If it happened even once I would have heard about it, as I live in Belgium. People are focusing on the wrong parts.

Exactly. It sounds like her son had some type of trauma related incident not a terminal disease. And in my experience patient’s families often do not understand what you are telling them. And the “doctor’s don’t know everything crowd” tend to be the worst. Good doctors freely admit they don’t know everything.

Plus it sounds like they were talking about pulling the plug. That....isn't self administered, which is the actual topic being discussed.

Yeah. plus, removal from life support is not the same issue as assisted suicide. My cousin was shot in the head, survived on life support, was thought to be a lost cause, then had a miraculous recovery. That does happen. But to compare that to someone with a terminal illness makes no sense.

Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown (D-Rialto) told lawmakers about her son, who was near death. Doctors urged her to let him go. Nineteen days later, he came off life support. He survived, and is now a husband and father. “Doctors don’t know everything,” Brown said.