Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteTiger
This is where I struggle with this. It can be 'easy' to see when one of these pods would be used in a medical situation. Far less so in a psychological one. I've been thinking on this for some time (after a friend's experience with his family and the MAID program) and I still have no answers. This strikes me as the kind of thing that could be debated until the heat death of the Universe.
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My Dad passed away via the MAID program. All in all, I think it was a great thing, and I know my Dad was so appreciative of being able to go on his own terms and with dignity. Living out of the country, for so long, I had no idead that was even a thing and my friends and family in the US had no idea this was even an option in other countries.
My Dad was 74 years old, cycling 100 miles 4-5 days/week when he got blindsided with pancreatic cancer. Went downhill pretty quickly physically over about 8 months, but was still walking around, and still himself mentally.
He was lucky in a sense that pancreatic cancer was pretty much automatically qualified as terminal. My parents have friends with some very tragic degenerative diseases that don't qualify.
The biggest problem from my experience in my Dad's case was that there was this pressure that he had to be fully capable mentally when it came time to set the date right up to the actual date/time it happened. There were a couple times he had some bad stuff happen where he was ready to pull the trigger, and then had a couple good weeks after where he was able to spend some special time with family. I think about how tragic the laws that I'm sure were well intentioned, almost robbed him and us of that. Also, it placed so much undo stress on him and my Mom at at time when that was the last thing they needed.
I don't know what the right answer is either, but a lot of controls they put in place can cause a lot of unintended consequences to the last people you'd want to hurt. But still it is a great thing that Canada has this, and I guess if those are the compromises they have to make to make it happen, it was probably worth it in our case.