There is a tiny chance (maybe 1%) that any one of us will die an awful suffering death. It's no-one's fault: it happens every day in Australia and will happen again with 100% certainty, because medicine will never be perfect and disease can be very cruel. It's just the epidemiology of disease.The question is what will our society will do about this suffering which is happening right now.
Around 80% of Australians consistently express the wish to have control of their own time of death when suffering becomes intolerable, and they make this decision for themselves. What the author can never justify is why he feels he can make this decision on my behalf.
When voluntary assisted dying and maybe gay marriage are finally accepted in our society, for the first time in 2000 years we will be able to live, love and die as we wish and according to our own ethical standards without the Catholic church, as the main anti-VAD lobbyist, butting in!

Old folk can't be allowed to drown in their vomit or have the bug in their system fed until they die of clinical dehydration? And snapping a rib as a consequence of coughing as you drown in your own vomit is just not fun!

While it's common enough, preventable with a care model that eats into the profit margin, and or a very limited budget?

And given a propensity of old folk to forget to remember good hygiene, they need to be isolated preferably before cross contamination infects the rest of the community, and a deity regime followed that literally starves the bug and improves their own immunity! And more cost effective than simply medicating the problem while feeding the bug with effective culture medium?

All meat and dairy products, ideally should be replaced for around 48 hours by black tea, burnt toast and honey only?

Rooms, bedding and furniture cleaned with raw bleach, steam and sunlight wherever practical.

One of my most enduring memories is of an elderly Grandfather who was not ready to go, being ejected from public hospital on the grounds they'd used up all the medical and budget options to treat his hopeless pneumonia.

We accepted him on the evocations of a distraught family who were not ready to say goodbye just yet either. And given adverse reactions to the then available antibiotics, we fought for him and his valuable to some, life, with round the clock postal drainage.

I was the one with the goldilock hands so I was the one tasked with the application of targeted and measured (pat pat)force, which usually resulted in half a mug of rubbish being coughed up.

It took three exhausting weeks to have him sitting up with the colour back in his cheeks surrounded by a loving laughing family whose gratitude knew no bounds.

I will carry that memory with me to the grave along with my opposition to a premature end reliant on confected reasons or invalid assumptions. If you want to end your life, it's your choice, go for it, who's stopping you?
Alan B.

Sorry, Alan. Was there supposed to be an argument against end-of-life choice somewhere in your rant about inadequate hospital services?

AlanB, if you want to rant and rave about how, apparently, all nurses are filthy money-grabbing creatures with no care for their patients, then allow me to rant and rave about paranoid, obsessed patients like you.
Anyone who suggests that dying patients should just knock themselves off rather than use legal euthanasia just has no idea at all.

With nursing and nursing homes, as in all professions, there are both good and bad staff and residents. Nasty, pompous, ignorant patients like you obviously were/are, is just one of the many reasons that nurses are leaving the profession in droves in Australia, and why the health department has to recruit heavily from non-English speaking countries.
Be very careful what you wish for....

How typical for those involved in so called aged care, to describe my post as a rant!

In the news this very morning was an expose of cruel and unusual treatment and serial elder abuse in many of our for profit nursing homes, where the aged are effectively are treated as brain dead morons without rights or simple human dignity?

No doubt hostility personified Susan and Amie will come to the rescue of the profit making management?

It can cost between $50.00 and $150.00 a day in government subsidized aged care. Generally speaking the $100'00 day cheaper, not for profit sector, is where the best care is given, I believe, by the best and most dedicated carers?

And yes there is a case for informed seniors, preferably before they have their cognitive ability is permanently impaired by aged care medication regimes, to have a right to refuse medication that has a bad reputation, like hemorrhagic poison warfram given to prevent clots even where it can in a deadly combination, create a virtual hemophiliac, who can literally bled to death from an unstoppable nose bleed?

Moreover, there are vastly superior but routinely withheld alternatives that might cost a few pennies more?

I am in favor of ending all government funding for the profit model and therefore, in favor of more of the less costly and superior, not for profit model; and where the $100.00 a day savings could be placed as additional aged care funding and presided over exclusively by the states? Who'd be less inclined to shove seniors out of hospital with their fractures still ununited and their conditions not reliably stabilized?

Wherever they're sent should still cost just one arm of government! It's called funding based on outcomes rather than providing service, which is often seriously insufficient?

I'd also advocate for the deployment of mandated CCTV to seriously curtail widely reported elder abuse and needed if ever serially abused elders are re empowered and able to take appropriate, evidence supported legal remedies! Yes, I'll be careful what I wish for!
Alan B.

While those abuses and cases of neglect are tragic, Alan, they do in no way amount to a case to deny people choice when life is worth living.

If vets and doctors can get access to a quick and painless death, why can't the rest of us?