This week we read provocative medical topics. Topics, which I have discussed in my Biomedical Ethics, but not delving into the depths of human dignity and medicine as much as this class is making me do. For me I chose the article by Gawande, A called “Letting Go;” it was about keeping people alive on life-sustaining medicine, and the people who chose to die without those measures.
The article centered around one particular person, a young woman with end-stage lung cancer. She just had her first child, and was told she was going to die. They did everything to keep her alive, but no treatment worked. She only got sicker and sicker, until she got pneumonia and slowly slipped into and out of death, before she finally took her last breath. Her parents and sister wanted to keep her alive, but her husband let her go. There was nothing more that could be done. They all knew that, but they did not want to believe it. I believe this article is directly related to human dignity. The family and doctors respected the woman’s wish to try everything, but at the end they let her go. In addition, they did not stop her from being a mother or a wife; they never stopped her from being human. They let her live her life, a painful life, but her spirit was able to retain its dignity to the last breathe and beyond.
For me this article brought up some tough memories. My uncle/godfather had terminal brain cancer. It was a tumor that he was born with, but no one knew he had. Near the last couple weeks of his life, he was not the same person. After all his extensive brain surgery he lost everything that made him human, he was in a vegetative state. He could neither look you in the eyes, smile, or laugh. I was too young to know what was going on, but I knew it was something bad. My aunt made the final decision to “pull the plug” on his life-sustaining measures. To me I thought she killed my uncle, I thought, “Why couldn’t we wait, He could pull out of this eventually.” Knowing what I know now, I understand that my aunt made a really rough decision, and it was the right one. Medicine would have not brought my uncle back to himself. His brain was so damaged by chemo, radiation and surgical resection, that all his human traits were gone. He was nothing, but a shell. A shell is not a life and I believe holds no dignity. ‘Letting go’ was the best decision, and also it makes me wonder how my aunt feels everyday knowing what she had to do to give my uncle his life back before he drift away.
This whole topic of letting go and life-sustaining measures connects to the theorist Peter Singer’s thoughts and ideas. According to Singer, he holds that the right to life is intrinsically tied to a being's capacity to hold preferences, which in turn is intrinsically tied to a being's capacity to feel pain and pleasure. Therefore, if a person cannot feel pain or pleasure then the person cannot possibly be alive or human. For instance, Singer would agree with the idea of “Letting go” to what happened to the young woman in the article and my uncle. However, since my uncle was born with this disease. Singer would have easily decided to put my uncle out his misery early in life. Additionally, the young woman knew of her tough road of her incurable disease, but still fought hard. Singer would have told her to give up.
We must make our own decisions; we cannot base them on previous experiences or theorists’ ideas. We must place trust in our own hearts and minds to know what is right for us. We cannot choose for others what we find best for us. It does not work that way. I chose my own path of life sustaining measures or “letting go,” and I will respect anyone’s wishes for what they want. This is human dignity to me.
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