Thinking about…

I intended to publish a blog this week about international diplomacy. I know that might sound like a strange thing for someone who spent most of their career working in social care and health to write about, however I’ll come back to that next week. I felt that with all of the discussion going on around assisted dying, I wanted to put my perspective out there

On Father’s Day two years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with extreme abdominal pain. After getting in touch with 111 (the UK’s telephone healthcare support system), on their advice I took a taxi up to my local general hospital. I sat in A&E for sometime, with a  nurse coming round dropping morphine into my mouth to help me cope with the pain. I assumed I had something like an appendicitis. 

Up to that day I was an obsessive exercise freak (although some would say I still am) and my only warning sign that there might be something going on was that my internal temperature seemed to be quite high and I felt more tired than I expected after a 50 K cycle ride. 

But….

Various examinations later, I was climbing onto an operating theatre table, saying it was fine for students to observe and that anything they took out of me could be kept for medical research. 

Why was I so exhausted after exercise? It wasn’t an appendicitis. It was advanced bowel cancer that had spread to my liver and my lungs – frankly, my prognosis wasn’t that great. In fact, for most people with my diagnosis it’s a miracle if they are still alive after five years.

So technically, I’m about halfway through what’s left of my lifespan. And currently, having survived the blitz and blast treatment phase I’m going through the stage where all of the treatments they’ve given me so far, have stopped working and the cancer is having a jolly old time growing away in my liver and lungs, whilst my consultant looks at what’s next and tries to see if there are any trials I could join.

You could say I’m an ideal candidate for assisted dying, or you could say I’m someone with a potentially life limiting condition who’s gonna do everything they can to damn well be here when my nearly 6-year-old granddaughter is 18. Dancing with her and her brother at her 18th birthday party. 

Now I know it’s unlikely that I’ll make it to her 18th, but I can do my damnedest to get there, and that that’s what annoys me and frightens me about assisted dying. I know it’s not an option I would ever agree to take. It adds to the mental pressure for me and my family about what I might want to do if I find that I’m in a position where I can no longer feel I can actively contribute to my family’s well-being and no longer share my knowledge with my social care and health community.

It might sound odd but I’ve been lucky enough to always think of work as a hobby, and although I’m retired now I’m still carrying on that hobby with gusto. Some might say I haven’t retired at all!

And here’s the crux of the issue for me about assisted dying and living in a society where personal choice trumps everything. It feels to me that we are being pushed into personalised death planning. A society that only gives a damn about the economically productive, and when your number looks like it might be up and the cost of your social care and health treatment plan becomes too expensive you can be offered (or coerced) into making the lives of everyone around you much easier by choosing death over life.

I understand why people in extreme pain might want to be able to choose an assisted death. But if assisted death becomes legally and culturally acceptable, how might less socially minded people in the future flex the boundaries and make assisted death something we all might be expected to choose for the greater good of society.

I don’t know about you, I’m not frightened by the thought of my own death. I am though frightened about the impact of my death on the lives of those I love and care about.

To me, if my death were to be assisted I think it would create a massive additional burden on my loved ones – a what if? Did we help him make the right decision? Was there another option? Were the medics being put under pressure to push his assisted death because the local health care system needed to be more “financially efficient”….?

These might be the ramblings of an eternal optimist having a mini melt down. Or they might be the ramblings of an eternal optimist being optimistic about beating the five year rule. Either way for me assisted dying is a completely unnecessary burden to be placed upon people with life limiting conditions and their families. 

There’s enough unnecessary death going on in the world without the UK government making it culturally acceptable to limit the life span of some people we might be defined as unproductive members of the community.

And why is this blog called ‘so long and thanks for all the fish’? Look up both versions from the film of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.’ It pretty much sums up why I have no intention of leaving my physical form just yet. As Louie Armstrong said, ‘We have all the time in world.’

Jim Thomas

November 2024