The Choice of What’s Right and What’s Wrong Assisted Suicide is a very controversial topic that many feel is right, but also wrong. I myself belief that Assisted Suicide is a method that is OK to practice. Do I feel this way because I’m morbid? No, but because I myself have had many experiences around cases that the individual has been very ill. On May 22, 2002 my father was diagnosed with cancer at the age of only 59. After a week of tests we found that the cancer was located in many different areas, and that our hope for his survival was very small. We sat by for 3 weeks watching him slowly start to pass away. I prayed every night and day to keep him alive, but one day my thoughts were at some point changed. I was sitting on the porch waiting for my Mom to pull up with my Dad in the car after his morning treatment of radiation. As the van pulled close I was in complete shock of what I was seeing before my eyes. My father had lost almost complete strength in his body at that point. He had a hard time just reaching for the handle to get the door open to get himself out. As the door opened my father climbed to the ground, and crawled up to our porch. I watched him slowly pull his body little by little until he was able to crawl inside the front door. I sat in horror as I cried with helplessness. Always had my father taken care of my family and I, and now I sat and watched as my Dad couldn’t find the ability to stand up anymore. At this point in my life if my father had decided to make the choice of dieing then, I truly believe that I would have stood at his side until the end. The pain and agony that I saw him living with day in and day out was a pain that I could never imagine. Another example of seeing those in this situation would be that of my high school career. I took a Health Tech class that required me to attend trips to the Hospital, An Elderly Folks home, and a Dr’s. Office. While attending all of these clinical sites I was faced with many different experiences. While working at the Hospital I remember my first patient as if it were yesterday. I went in along with a Nurse and another student to assist in a complete bed bath. She had many pictures on her stands and taped to the wall of her family, and loved ones. She talked of how much she loved them all very much, but she was in so much pain that she didn’t know if she wanted to live anymore. As we took care of her for the next few weeks you could see the darkness building in her eyes. She was very ill, and didn’t want to live with the agony anymore. Along with this I saw many other similar cases while working at a Manor. While talking to the residents it was not a unusual occurrence for the elderly to talk about nothing other then death, and how they hated to live in the condition that they did. Sometimes I felt wrong for doing it, but I would look at them and wonder if that’s how my life will someday be. Will I be the person that sits in a small corner room with family that doesn’t bother to show up for even a 10 minute visit? It is a life that I could not imagine living, and I hope that if the day comes that I do have to spend my time in a place of that kind, I won’t have to be there for long. Working in a Dr’s. Office was a lot different from any other. I was there 5 days a week for 9 weeks straight. When I first started I was nervous about what I was going to do, and maybe even see. When first starting to see the patients come in I was fine. I wasn’t exactly sure at first why they were there, but as the weeks went on I learned a little more about each person. Seeing those that walked in the first week looking like a normal person, and walking out the last week I was there looking as though they had aged 40 years was nothing short of scary. These were individuals that had lived everyday normal lives, and one day they wake up to find that they are dieing. My conclusion to all of this is again that I do feel assisted suicide is something that should be OK. If an individual has no hope ahead of their life, and they are tired of being sick, shouldn’t they have the say in what happens with them living of dieing? This is a choice that I feel should be every persons right. When you are sick, or full of pain, there is not another person in the world who knows what exactly you are feeling. Everyone deals with things differently so maybe we should all be given the chance to take the pain away if that is how we chose to free ourselves from the pain.
