by Hillarie Goldstein

Created on: September 07, 2007   Last Updated: November 29, 2007

Having worked in the nursing field, I know that euthenasia goes on everyday. There was one instance of it that was so bizarre, if I didn't witness it myself, I would not have believed it. I was working as a home health aide for a man with ALS(Lou Gehrig's Disease.) He was at the mid stages of the disease, not expected to die right away. He was almost completely paralyzed, but still communicative. On my third day on the case, I arrived to find his daughter in a state of agitation. Her father had expressed to her that he was in pain. He had never done this before and she was understandably upset. She had been trying all day to reach the nursing agency. None of her calls had been returned. Finally she got them on the phone. A few hours later they came by. They left some pain medication with instructions on how to use it. She used the medication according to their instructions and a few hours later her father was dead. He died around midnight. Somehow I made it through the rest of the night (I couldn't reach the nurses) handling the poor shocked and distraught daughter as best I could until the nurses arrived again the next morning.

The poor daughter was so relieved to have someone with knowledge and authority to lean on the next day, that when the nurses walked through her door again she greeted them like old friends. I'm sure it didn't hit her until a few days later what they had done to her.

I've been around medical settings enough to figure out what happened. ALS is a terrible way to die. They usually die by choking to death. The nurses figured it would be humane to use the man's pain as an opportunity to let him die comfortably.
But they tricked his daughter and they used her like a tool. The way they treated her was unconscionable. But these nurses had probably euthanized so many people by that time that they were completely enured to the reality of what they were doing. This is just one story. It goes on all the time.

Where it mostly goes on is in hospice situations. The concept of hospice(palliative care for the dying) leaves itself wide open for these occurences, because there is such a thin and sometimes grey line between aggressively treating pain when you know the medication might cause death and deliberately using the medication to cause death. (I am sure that's what the nurses in my opening scenario did- deliberately cause death- because the man's pain was not extreme and because he was not in a weakened enough condition to die from a small dose.)

I don't

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