Efforts to Prolong My Husband’s Life Cost Him an Easy Death | Hacker News Reader

Efforts to Prolong My Husband’s Life Cost Him an Easy Death

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18 pointsozdave8 comments

Tragic. My friend in Canada says 80% of medical spending is in the last 20% of the lives of Canadians.

I read a similar story a few years ago,probably from HN, about a woman whose husband suffered a severe stroke. While he was in the hospital, the doctors told her he needed a pacemaker. Without thinking she said "of course" but she unknowing extended his life by 10 years because of this error. And he only got worse to the point where she wished he would die, which made her feel even more guilty. A truly horrible situation that no one should be put in, but we are because we have the technology and the misbegotten notion that everyone should live, even st the expense of life.

The problem is that you often don't know what the state of the patient is going to be in a year, two or five, after the treatment. My grandma is 88 now. A few years ago she had serious issues with heart, blood overpressure, and electrolyte balance and and a few other things which made her look and feel like half dead. Some doctors didnt give her any chances, some said she wouldn't walk anymore, or some said she would stay in the hospital till the end. After a few years of trial and error in the treatment, multiple stays in hospital, they finally found a way to "fix" all the things. Now she feels and behaves like she was 60. Her quality of life went 10 levels up. She takes care of herself, goes out, meets people, tells jokes, etc.

Sure, but I think from context that employee8000 is talking about a stroke so severe that there was no chance the husband would have a significant recovery.

Follow the money. Key quote from the article:

   In 2011, Medicare spending was almost
   $554 billion ― 28 percent of which was spent
   during patients’ last six months of life

Thankfully my personal experiences with dying relatives were not like this. At the end there was in-home hospice care. When the pain got to be too much, the morphine dose was gradually increased.

Sadly, we do need go through this experience firsthand with our parents and relatives. It's the only way we'll really come to understand that it will eventually happen to us.

When there's a reasonable prospect of treatment giving someone years of healthy life, it's important that the treatment happens. But there are a lot of patients where that's not a possibility, everyone knows it's not a possibility, in some cases they sign orders refusing care because they know that any extra time it would add to their life would be torture, and... hospitals do it to them anyways.

Because they get paid to.

Hospitals should not be able to bill for care given in violation of a DNR that they knew about. If hospitals give care in violation of an advance directive, and the effect is to keep someone barely-alive in a state of terrible pain for a short time before they die anyways, then they should be liable for the pain and suffering they inflicted.

In this case, the patient agreed to the surgery. He was lucid and able to speak. The wife's argument, which I support, is that he was gaslighted into saying yes by unreasonable promises from his doctors.

I've read of surveys that show that something like 80% of doctors don't want to be resuscitated.

1. It is normal that the most money is spent close to unsolvable problem, i.e. death. We won’t be able to extend life more if we all agree to die without fighting.

2. Life doesn’t make any sense without heroic measures. Once you make the meaning of your life “peaceful and pain-free” then you become home pet and you are already dead as a human, you don’t produce new information.

3. “Death isn’t the boogeyman”. Right, and the people who agree to accept torturous of dying process show other people how much does it cost being alive to keep chances to survive. Being alive cost much more than any torture. One day any decease may be treated.

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