Never mind assisted-dying, our health care system needs to change the way it deals with the natural end of life
I’ve spent much of my career in the health care field, but it took a very personal experience to drive home just how poorly prepared health care providers are to help us through the one certain life-experience that awaits us all: death.
It happened in a hospital in southern Ontario. My father-in-law, Ijaz Ahmad, who lived with insulin-dependent diabetes for 35 years, went into the hospital for a partial foot amputation due to a bone infection.
Prior to surgery, a routine diagnostic test was performed requiring dye to be inserted into his bloodstream. After the surgery, the dye put him into kidney failure while it was being metabolized. Within a day of the surgery all of his organs started to fail and he was put on life support for what we were told would be two to three days so his organs could rest and strengthen — after which, we were told, “the doctors would bring him back.”
He spent the next 18 days on life support. And what became clear over that long 18-day ordeal is that what had clearly become the end of his life would have been unnecessarily prolonged depending on which of the eight doctors we interacted with was treating him that day.
Read more at the source: Toronto Star
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Ismailimail 
Hi, I totally agree with you and what the doctors do in the hospital. My mother was sick and she did not feel like eating in hospital because she could never eat the blend food of the hospital. Within two days she was operated and a tube was inserted in stomach so that she have drug cans food in her system and bed-ridden for the rest of life.Of course she was living with my younger brother because mothers like to live their sons and doctor knew so then my brother just had one alternative was left to him to put her in nursing home. You know Nursing homes belong to doctor so their business get money. I took my mom from the hospital and brought her to kitchener to my house and I took care of her for 21/2 years until she passed away. As I had work in this field I know how doctor make the case bad so that they nursing flourish. Sorry to say and nobody belived me in my family.
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I could not agree with you more as a health care professional who work in palliative care which involved discussion about advance care planning…
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