An Unfair Sentence

Lately I've found myself thinking a fair amount about a story I read recently.

There was a young mother (I can't remember her age but I know she wasn't that old) who gave birth to a child with severe cerebral palsy. At something like 5 or 7 years of age, this child was never going to progress in abilities beyond that of a 6 month old child. He couldn't walk, talk, interact, couldn't feed himself, wore diapers and was completely bedridden. He had to be fed almost around the clock with very small bites of food because he'd choke if he ate a whole meal at one time.

Those things were never going to change.

This mother let the child starve to death. When they found him, he weighed something like 15 lbs. She is facing 25 years to life for it.

At first I was angry, thinking and feeling she deserved it, because after all, how cruel is it for a mother to kill her own kid? It's one of those crimes against nature that you just can't understand.

But after I thought about it, my view started to change. It wasn't this mother who failed her child, it was society and religion that failed that family. What kind of life would that dead child have had? Ok so let's say money was no object and 24 hour care was provided - so he would get to lay in a bed for his entire life and never even have a life??? How incredibly selfish, unfair and sadistic is that? It's sick to a degree that I cannot fathom. Then consider the mother - how unfair is it to expect her to care for this child? How unfair for her to have it in the first place??

And that is because I am a veterinarian with extremely agnostic, borderline atheistic, views on religion. I was granted the incredibly kind and generous power to euthanize my suffering patients, although that power was granted by a really fucked up society.

Now, I'm not saying that starving this kid to death was the answer. But I think I can understand the desperation, the depression, the fear and the overwhelming depth of emotion this mother must have felt.

She should have had a right to euthanize that kid. Legally. Humanely. And without the judgment of stupid christians who all feel they get to play god all of the time anyway. And, if they knew this child was sick when it was in the womb, she should have been given an abortion.

If these things were legal, this woman would not even be in trouble because she probably would have had him put to sleep. It's a fine line on something that is incredibly unfair and inhumane. We, as a society, failed her by shoving antiquated beliefs about euthanasia and "right to life" bullshit down her throat, forcing her into an unwinnable situation.

I'm going to try to follow the story closely, but I know in my heart that the unjust spin put on it by the media is devoid of the emotion that I am certain she went through in trying to provide that level of care for a brain dead blob of a human. I know that sounds harsh, but that's the reality and I've no interest in being PC on my blog.

The world needs to wake up, get the fuck out of the dark ages, and start allowing abortion and humane euthanasia in humans.

Jack Kevorkian was right; we need to get religion out of medicine and start letting doctors do their jobs.

The Age of Denial

Something that has weighed on my mind for a few years now is why many of the old people I see are grumpy and negative. I try to have patience with them and after much pondering and thought, I think I understand why they get to be that way.

As you go through life, you gain and lose wealth, you gain and lose material items, you gain and lose jobs, etc. Those are things that fall under the "time heals all wounds" mantra.

But what doesn't fall under that mantra is the loss of the people in your life. I don't care who claims that it eventually gets better - it doesn't. Maybe we learn to cope and maybe we learn to reorganize the thoughts in our brain so we sweep things aside and don't think about it every second, but that doesn't take away the pain of the feelings of loss that we gain every day, week, month and year as we age.

On average, by the time you're in your 40s, you're starting to feel this pain of loss of people around you. It might be an insignificant impact on your life, like the loss of Hollywood actors (I'm still sad over the loss of Heath Ledger, Patrick Swayze, etc) or it might be close friends or even family members. Either way, you start getting the hints about what the rest of life will look like, no matter what you've built, what family or friends you have, or what you do.

The grumpiness I see in old people, I believe, is about the compounding feeling of loss that worsens as we get older.

Now, there are some christians out there that will say believing in their mythical god will make that better, that believing in heaven will take away the sting of that. I say that believing in that could also be explained as a way to deal with the pain of loss - it's too big to get your head around, it's too painful to even accept, really... so telling yourself you'll see them again or that they're in a "better place" or whatever is a way to deal with a pain so deep and detrimental that you... well... can't deal with it.

It's a form of denial, no matter how you look at it.

I don't have any answers; this is just something I've been thinking about, as my own inner feelings are creeping up on me at the realization that I'm scared inside over the loss of those close to me. The older I get, the more I have this sinking feeling of dread over waking up to a 2 am phone call saying someone in my family is gone. It's almost like you go into a weird waiting mode, knowing it will come some day but walking around trying not to think about it. Again, denial.

So no matter how you want to look at it or spin it, it's all a form of denial! It's because we have no answers about god or however you define the afterlife - christian, atheist, agnostic - we all live in a state of denial.

Is it good? I don't know. I'll think about it some more later. :)