Tuesday 3 August 2010

Voluntary euthanasia.

What could possibly go wrong?


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Completely tasteless - and very, very funny.

Anonymous said...

If your getting a surplus of tomatoes and chilli's from your greenhouse LI I can recommend doing a swift chutney. Dead easy and quick to do, uses up dozens of toms and with the right ingredients will blow your head off for months to come.
I know its off topic, sorry.

Anonymous said...

Very funny song. Some years ago, when the debate was current, as it is from time to time, I asked a nurse friend of mine if she agreed with voluntary euthanasia and her response surprised me. She said: "Yes, but not if it was left to the family to make the decision." Being as current thinking then, as now, was pretty much that "the family" were the only people who could/should make such a decision, I was intrigued to know how she had come to such a radically different viewpoint. Her response surprised me even more. She said that, whenever "allowing someone to die" was raised as a subject either by the family or by a member of the medical team, a little bit of subtle digging almost always revealed, not concern for the patient, but usually some other superficial reason associated with the still-healthy members of the family, often money, but also often the concern that the burden of care for a chronically-sick relative would fall on them, thus disrupting their otherwise orderly little lives. In one extraordinary case she said that one family actually raised the question themselves and started suggesting "convenient" times when the "plug could be pulled." Their reason? They were moving house shortly and said it would be inconvenient to visit the sick relative in hospital for much longer, should he continue to remain sick for a long time before he got better (i.e. there was, in fact, a good chance that he would get better in time, but it might take too long for them to fit him into their busy new schedule).

She said that working as a hospital nurse had completely destroyed any much-cherished ideals she might have had about "the family" being the cornerstone of a secure society, full of love and affection. Most families, she concluded, were comprised of a group of selfish people who just happened to be connected by birth who were pretty much all just out to look after themselves and their own kids, and to hell with anyone outside their immediate nuclear circle who needed help or support.

Cynical? Well, maybe. But then it sometimes takes a person on the real cutting-edge of life and death to see people in their true colours, rather than through the rose-tinted spectacles of the mainstream media with their happy-clappy stereotype of the "hardworking, caring family."

Leg-iron said...

Anon 2 - if the sun doesn't come out soon, I'll finish the season with nothing but green tomatoes. I'll have to look up a chutney recipe.

Leg-iron said...

Anon 3 - there are families like that. Far too many of them.

One of my grandfathers was bed-ridden for years before he died. he stayed at home. The idea of him staying (or dying) anywhere else never even surfaced. My grandmother would have flattened anyone who even suggested pulling the plug.

But then, he didn't have any money. Also, back then, the family all lived in the same area. A further factor is that there were a lot of us so looking after one or two sick ones wasn't much of a chore.

Now, with the pressure on to keep up payments on all those fripperies people have been conned into buying, it must be very tempting to look at Grandad's nest egg and think...

I'm not worried. I don't have any money to speak of either.

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