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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

This serves as a reminder that I need to make sure my wishes are well documented and understood by my family that under no circumstances should they keep my body alive for 15 years in similar circumstances. And especially don't try to give me a tiny bit more consciousness, so that I may suffer.

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I'm terrified to think this person may be conscious enough to be experiencing the equivalent of 15 years of sleep paralysis.

Fuck. That.

This train of thought does not lead to a good place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKoCppbGFI

I don’t understand the relevancy of this game demo you linked.

Trapped in a body

This exactly. I've been very clear to my wife I don't want that at all.

You’d probably want to go a step further and formalize it if you have any doubt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_healthcare_directive

If I had a choice between suffering and dying... I'd pick whichever had a greater chance of letting me achieve any of my goals. Maybe seeing my family one more time would be a worthy goal, or maybe sparing them some suffering would be a better one, but I'd rather make that choice myself.

Great. Please document how you'd like your family to think about it. Patients who aren't clear on what they care about make it harder on their physicians and much more importantly on their families. 'I think he would have wanted...' vs 'He says he wanted X, right here in this document.' Most physicians will bend over backwards to try to make it happen if its a realistic goal.

The thing is, I don't care what will happen when I can't think for myself anymore. If my family, or whoever, wants to think about what I would have wanted... that's not my problem anymore, I'll be out, and as far as I'm concerned they can do whatever they want. That's why I'd rather not document anything: if I can make the decision, I don't want anyone or anything to make that decision for me, and if I can't, then I don't care.

I on the other hand would never, ever want to die or not regain consciousness.

Sure, if you want to choose death, that's your choice.

But you should also be aware that many many other people would choose life.

What makes you think they aren't aware of that? They were clearly expressing their own wishes...

This is 100% true in an absolute sense. You either choose life or death.

However, it misses a huge amount of nuance. Some of the nuanced questions include: what qualifies as alive? - brain dead? - blood pressure only being maintained with medications? - requiring permanent ventilator to breath? - 'locked in' syndrome where you have literally no way of communicating with the world? - combinations of the above? what quality of life would you accept? does how you die matter?

It's not as easy as deciding to just 'choose death'. Sure, most everyone would choose to live in a healthy body without pain, but that really isn't a realistic choice for most patients who are making that choice at that point in their lives.

Either way, whatever you choose, you should document what you prefer to make things easier on your loved ones.

Sure but they should be well aware of their choice. If they are paralyzed in your body unable to move and respond in any manner for 15 years, are they okay with that?

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