“The right to die”

After Vic’s Dad spent a week in ICU, ventilated and bleeding from his eyes, she signed the documents to allow the doctors to turn off the ventilator.  Tienie was an organ donor.  We were allowed to say our goodbyes and then the transplant team swept in.   Sometime later the machines were switched off and Tienie was officially declared dead…..

Tienie lived life to the full.  He believed sleep was a waste of time.  He never sat still for a single minute.  He loved life!  He had a brilliant mind.  He was articulate and well educated.  He was a very proud man.  If Tienie had lived he would have been condemned to “Locked-In Syndrome“.  I remember standing next to his hospital bed thinking “What if that brilliant mind is trapped in a body that cannot communicate?”

Vic received a couple of letters from grateful recipients telling her what a difference Tienie’s organ’s had made to their lives.

On numerous occasions Vic has been on life support.  We have been told to say our goodbyes.  We said our goodbyes.  Vic started breathing on her own…

Across the world people have prayed for Vicky’s life to be spared/saved.  I have seen medical teams fight for her life refusing to let her slip into the arms of death.  The bottom line is that doctors have played God in her life for many, many years.  They decided when she was NOT allowed to die…

Doctors proclaim they do not want to play God…..They will fight day and night, for weeks on end, to save a very sick person’s life regardless of the individual’s wishes and quality of live.  Doctors and Governments assume the right to decide when a sick person may die.  God surely did not intend people to live a miserable life… Just yesterday Britain’s High Court rejected an attempt by a man who has locked-in syndrome to overturn the country’s euthanasia law by refusing to legally allow doctors to end his life.

Tony Nicklinson had a stroke in 2005 that left him unable to speak or move below his neck. He requires constant care and communicates mostly by blinking, although his mind has remained unaffected and his condition is not terminal.  Locked-in syndrome is a rare neurological disorder where patients are completely paralyzed, and only able to blink. Patients are conscious and don’t have any intellectual problems, but they are unable to speak or move……

“The suicide, the mystic, the woman who seeks an abortion, the cancer patient who smokes a joint (the cancer patient’s long-suffering lover who smokes a joint)—all are roundly condemned for their escape from “responsibility” but truly feared for their escape from jurisdiction. It is a fear with a long and traceable history. The Roman emperor Tarquin crucified the bodies of citizens who committed suicide in order to escape his tyranny. When Margaret Sanger began her campaign for birth control, she was accused of permitting women to escape their God-ordained sorrow in bearing children.” http://harpers.org/archive/2005/02/0080411

We live in a world filled with hypocrites and people with double standards.  I have said it before – people take the moral high ground and assume the role of God.  Did God intend for man or woman to “live” connected to machines to keep them breathing?  People accept the death of a six-year-old child by aerial bombardment or economic sanctions and defend the life of a six-week-old fetus. I personally live in a country where children still die from inadequate medical care and hunger.

It is not physician-assisted suicide that poses the greatest threat to the poor and the disabled but physician-assisted eternal life: Rich people will pay a lot of money for illegally harvested organs… The poor, from a different continent, will sell their organs to buy seed for their farms….

The World Trade Centre – did the jumpers commit suicide or were they murdered?  According to most religions the jumpers will go to hell because they took a life – albeit their own….  How stupid!!!!

It is my personal opinion that Tony Nicklinson has been sentenced to a Life of Disability rather than being allowed “Death with Dignity.” He cannot wipe his own nose, wipe a tear from his eyes, scratch his ear….. He cannot control his bodily functions.  He cannot even take a lethal dose of medication.

I pray that God will have mercy on me and allow me the time, mobility and clarity of mind to end my life rather than live the indignity and miserable life that Tony Nicklinson has been condemned too.

God have mercy!