• UK: Man shot wife with dementia in care home 'to end suffering'
    32 replies, posted
Alzheimers and dementia runs absolutely rampant in my family. I hope someone puts me down when the time comes. I mean that with all my heart.
I hope he doesn't get punished, I don't condone what he did but it must have been torture to do what he did. He shouldn't spend the rest of his life behind bars for this.
I work in a memory care unit at an assisted living facility. PoA's should be more than able to make these decisions. Many of the family members even prefer it to the suffering some of the residents go through. Early onset Alzheimer's resident that's only 55 and her husband and children never visit because they can't deal with it and they moved on long ago, when she was less severe she would ramble about wanting to die in broken sentences and fractured English, or cry and scream constantly, now she can't even string together two words and parrots what others say around her. Barely eats, can't make decisions regarding anything even minor, but is still noticeably miserable. Her doctors even purposefully took her off medication so she'd degrade more quickly so that she was less combative and aggressive, and although she's more compliant, her mind is still empty and what little remains is miserable. If it were legal, and she was aware of the state she'd be in at this age 10 years ago, there's no doubt in my mind that she would have made the decision right then and there to be euthanized when she began showing heavy signs of decline, before advancing this far. This is a common and regular occurrence, and the fact that we've conditioned society to think its honorable to extend the lives of people who don't want to live any more and have a valid reason to want to die, simply to pretend we have the moral highground or that we're doing something right, is almost disgusting. Hospice is a godsend for a majority of these people and the change in care from extending life to making life more comfortable is far more respectable, when you're at that point, in my eyes.
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