Reply to What Was "The End" Like?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you're asking about a person's last moments, there is inability to breathe, sometimes due to cardiac arrest, or sometimes due to fluid in the airway. When patients are under heavy meds or asleep, they might not react, and go peacefully. Other times, the body fights as it starts to shut down, and it's traumatic for the patient and the onlookers.

Death is usually not pretty, OP. Just like birth. Both, unless medication is involved, tend to be painful, even if only for a brief while.

Modern society has stopped being present for deaths, which are often walled off from society and happen in hospitals under long-term medical care. Deaths before modern medicine used to happen most often at home, surrounded by relatives and neighbors, and after very brief illnesses. Death was a social affair, and last moments were familiar to all. There was very rarely this long walk towards death that our elderly undertake nowadays, accompanied by years of medical support and interventions, and an end either missed by relatives or attended only by a very few.

While it's wonderful that we can prolong life these days, and alleviate some types of pain, it's also important to think about what we want before and in our last moments, and how much, or how little intervention we desire from the medical establishment. Too many people are kept barely alive, in what must be agonizing pain (except they can't show it), before their final release, just because doctors have a sworn duty of preserving life, and the patient has not indicated a preference for receiving less supportive measures. For ex: think about a terminally ill patient or a very elderly frail patient who has a cardiac arrest and whose ribcage gets smashed during resuscitation because they have no DNR. Even though there is no long-term hope for them.

Make plans.[/quote]

"Other times, the body fights as it starts to shut down, and it's traumatic for the patient and the onlookers." What does this look like? [/quote]

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