"Healthy people can’t tell you about medicine." - The Ignorant Ninja
People that don't know me well might not be surprised to find out that I was a bit of a bully in school. People that know me much better probably would. Or maybe it's the other way around? At any rate, I was a bit of a prick. I ran into a girl that I would crush on a little when I was really little and apparently I used to hit her with skipping ropes. This was before I had memory so I basically had to take her word for it that I used to. Then another girl told me the same thing and that pretty much confirmed it.
When I was in grade school I knew bullying was wrong, but I got bullied myself and was just extremely angry all the time. I convinced myself that it wasn't so bad because I watched people do worse all the time. I didn't single anyone out that much, and I never beat anyone up or helped anyone gang up on anyone else, which is better than I could say for a lot of other kids.
My first real wake up call was a girl we all would pick on. Her name was Karen and well, it sucked to be her. She was the poorest kid in a poor town, even poorer than I was. She had a voice like she was getting run over by the puberty train, bad skin, glasses, dandruff, just about everything that would make it hard to be a kid around douche bags. One day after school, a handful of kids and I were stuck in detention. The teacher would put our names on the chalkboard and then if we kept being bad he'd add a check mark, and we all turned getting as many check marks as possible into this really stupid competition. So we were all stuck there for a while.
While we were sitting there a truck screeched toward the parking lot. Karen’s father stumbled out, obviously drunk and headed towards our classroom. He poked his head in and asked "Where the fuck is Karen?"
We shrugged.
"You don't fucking know nothin' do ya?" he said and took off. That's when it started to dawn on me that it sucked to be Karen even worse than I thought. I wasn't quite out of the douchebag woods yet though. It took another event for me.
There was this kid named Chris. We called him Tiffer, as in 'Christ-tiffer' but he didn't like that. He had a bit of a stutter but he wasn't one of the kids I really bothered other than calling him Tiffer with a shitty inflection to it. One day the other kids tell me that his sister died in a car crash on Halloween. So I decided I should probably be extra nice to him while he deals with that. I'd have to be a pretty crappy person to pick on someone when they're going through grief like that. Then I start thinking about Karen and how I picked on her a little less after finding out that her dad was an abusive piece of shit. Then I started to think about how maybe other kids had to deal with stuff that was even worse but I just didn't hear about it. That's when I started making an effort to not be a bastard. Other kids were still pretty awful. Rednecks would throw slurpees or rocks from their trucks as they drove by kids on the main road to high school. They'd jump kids walking by themselves while in groups. But I made sure not to follow suit.
My parents started to run a mini storage place when I was a teenager. They ran it for a good 15 years or so, and after a breakup with a girlfriend I was staying there for about a year. I had an RV in one of the back lots and my dad and I would hang out and smoke pot and fuck around on the internet. We ended up befriending this guy named Moe. While a little socially clueless, Moe was a really great human being. He'd give you the shirt off his back any time of day. He was also a fucking hero. See, Chris, the guy I used to pick on in school was living in a campground, one that I've mentioned in one of my other stories, in a tent. One day he came home and stuck his head in the tent with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Well, he had a hibachi BBQ inside and it had been slowly filling the tent up with propane while he was gone, and it exploded. He was covered with burning plastic, and if Moe hadn't have been there he would have burned to death. Moe grabbed a blanket, smothered him, and called 9-11, saving Chris's life.
Chris ended up with 3rd degree burns all over his body. His nerves and tendons were damaged, and the way I heard it is they were going to do an operation and take some tendons from his back or something, and put them into one of his legs. Well, while they were operating on him they didn't account for left and right properly, and operated on the wrong leg. So Chris was confined to a wheelchair.
Because of the explosion, Chris ended up with a strong phobia of fire and a love of water, so he became an aquarium technician. He bred fish and aquatic plants and helped people set up their aquariums. I had him on Facebook and one day he was saying some very red flag kind of stuff. He was going off about how his roommate was playing games with his head and he knew how to play them back. He was giving off the vibe that if things kept going there was going to be a blow up, and I don't mean pyrotechnic related, or maybe it would have been. I reached out to Chris, mentioned how he was indirectly responsible for me being less of a prick, reminisced about Moe, and started asking what was going on with the roommate. Well it was a lot of drama but long story short they were driving each other insane. She wouldn't move out and he was going to start trying to fuck with her to make her.
I had many conversations with Chris warning him that it wouldn't work out the way he wanted it to. See, Chris is hyper-intelligent, and the problem with hyper-intelligent people is they're awesome at rationalizing and often refuse to believe they're disadvantaged against stupid people. His roommate was, if reports were accurate, a very stupid person. But she knew Chris was terrified of fire. My prediction was if things kept going, she was going to flip out and try and burn his apartment down. So I spent about a month coaching Chris through finding alternatives, and just like that, after over half a year of banging his head against a wall, things started to resolve themselves. She moved out, he got a girlfriend, and suddenly he wasn't posting 20 heartbreak songs on Facebook every day.
Well, just the other day Chris messaged me. We've been trading memes back and forth for the past half a year since, and he was telling me that his health problems have been getting worse. He'd been arguing with the doctors a lot as... well... we don't exactly have many competent physicians were I live. The good ones are few and far between and stretched pretty tight. He was waiting to find out if his issues were less severe, or if it was multiple sclerosis. It turns out, it's MS. Chris, having basically given up at this point starts telling me that the doctor was recommending M.A.I.D., or Medical Assistance In Dying. I cracked about how originally I used to support M.A.I.D. but changed my mind when I started finding out that doctors were bringing it up around people who didn't ask about it. See I thought it was going to be used exclusively for elderly people in chronic pain, and now they're trying to get it approved for people with all sorts of ailments like mental illness. I'm now conflicted because to me it's a copout to offer medical assistance in dying for people who are mentally ill when we have a country that makes you mentally ill.
That's when Chris told me that he thinks it's his best option. He wants out. That left me in a hard position, because while I do my best to respect peoples medical wishes, and I don't know what it's like to deal with what he has to deal with, I also promised myself I would always do what I felt was right; that in life you only get one shot sometimes and you can't half ass it. Like Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad declared; "No more half measures."
So, I did my best to talk to Chris man to man. I explained that in my opinion he's using his formidable intelligence to justify giving up. That he doesn't want to cost the system, but that's what the system is there for. The reason I pay taxes is so people like Chris can get medical care, not so the Prime Minister can have a fucking cocaine enema party on a yacht somewhere. That I don't know enough to say more than that and there's a degree of selfishness at play. And that's all I could do.
We talked about the costs of the funeral, and then traded some memes back and forth again.
“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, and while it is in your power, be good.” Marcus Aurelius
"I'm now conflicted because to me it's a copout to offer medical assistance in dying for people who are mentally ill when we have a country that makes you mentally ill."
This is it.
I absolutely understand every individual who, for whatever reason, feels like they have been pushed to the end of their rope.
I also despise the society that objectively has enough wealth to make everyone's ropes so much longer and sturdier, but refuses to do so.
Kevorkian was a local figure here in metro Detroit and one that my family openly supported. His work was touted by them as giving the dignity of death to suffering elderly patients and I believe that’s the entirety of what he did. So like you, I had a certain impression of what assisted death meant and who it is for. Hearing that a physician would bring it up and to a younger patient instead of the patient bringing it up is horrifying. There are so many lonely and depressed people, so many sensitive to the larger than life opinions of medical doctors. What a minefield. What a ducked society that people just want out.