Dying in America
My father in-law is dying. He was supposed to live for perhaps a week or so at most, but he’s still here. Modern medicine is a torture chamber of horrors, keeping the ill and infirm alive far longer then what should be allowed by law. His last few months have been pure hell, with numerous tests, diagnoses and misdiagnoses, an endless array of drugs and being shuffled back and forth to the hospital and “rehab”. It’s a complete money-making circus.
The reason he’s still here is because of his gold-plated health insurance. They’re milking him for as long as they possibly can. It’s an endless litany of ‘medical procedures’ which in another age would simply be called what it actually is: torture. He puts up with it, because he doesn’t know what else he can do.
I don’t have any health insurance and would not receive even a fraction of the ‘health care’ that he’s getting. My sister in-law had pancreatic cancer, but her health plan was pretty weak. So they basically sent her home to die after just a single chemo treatment. She died horribly, in severe pain, contorted and contracted into a hollow shell of what she was before. She was very beautiful, but you would not have even recognized the creature she had been turned into.
My health plan is to end my own life when I can no longer take care of myself. I’ve shared this position with my father in-law. He didn’t have much to say about it other then life insurance won’t pay out if you kill yourself. I don’t have any life insurance either.
It’s truly appalling to watch someone die at the hands of doctors who think they’re ‘helping’ when they’re not. They understand only what they’ve been taught and you would be very surprised to know that the average person with a little investigation can actually know more then they do, especially in the area of nutrition. As little as 2 hours of nutrition instruction are all that is required to become a medical doctor. Hardly any doctors recognize nutrition as being the cause of most diseases. This should be obvious. A lifetime of eating poor quality, nutritionally absent food, laced with chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides cannot possibly be what the human body needs.
I don’t know a lot about pancreatic cancer, but it’s often environmentally caused. Diet can be a primary cause. So can smoking. Both my father in-law and sister in-law smoked, although she quit many years ago. He never did, until after a quadruple (or was it triple?) bypass. Multiple cartons per weeks (I’d have to say 2, so that’s 40 packs a week for 60 years) left him with emphysema, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), diabetes, an enlarged heart and a as-yet undiagnosed mass in his lungs. They’re “guessing” cancer at this point. He doesn’t have long to live.
But he brought almost all of this upon himself. Another example of denial in other words. Do what you want, but do not expect to pay the consequences. My sister in-law ate a lot of meat, particularly barbecued meat, a known carcinogen. But she was also around all of that smoke from her father for many years, and then took up the habit herself off and on. Her diet was also pretty horrible as it turns out.
Doctors will step in and help you where they can. But they do almost nothing to encourage you to eat right, live right and avoid them. That would require a lot less doctors and they’d make a lot less money. Instead, they’re all oriented towards treating the endless array of diseases we bring upon ourselves. Diabetes in particular, is a truly horrible disease that will severely impact your quality of life 24/7. You ‘survive’ with diabetes and constant treatment, but you run a terrible risk of amputation, blindness and where the slightest tiniest injury can cause your death. Injections can run thousands of dollar per month, depending on your severity.
It’s reversible, with a healthy diet. But you rarely find anyone that will bother with this. Unfortunately, this describes my father in-law, who continued to eat incredibly badly, consuming junk food, fast food, fried foods and meat. He always pushed his vegetables away if they came on his plate. I even saw him do this in the hospital. Of course, at this stage, he should just eat whatever the hell he wants, but it’s a reflection of a lifetime of unhealthy, careless living.
He ‘survives’ now with a breathing tube, but when we got there, it was a full face-mask that was actually breathing for him. He can’t expel the carbon dioxide that builds up in his bloodstream, so the breathing mask he requires helps with this poison. All he can do now is try to breath, live for the next breath. And then the next. And then the next. It’s absolutely fucking horrible.
I’d have killed him if he had asked me to do so, but he didn’t. But it did occur to me that there must be millions of people just like him, or soon to be just like him. I know that the smoking industry has killed hundreds of millions of people with their cancer sticks, but it hasn’t stopped people from smoking.
It would be better to die in a car wreck, or fall over dead from a stroke. Or anything that doesn’t prolong your life of torture like this. The ancients used to believe that it was glorious to die in battle against your enemies and I can easily see that they were more right then wrong. A lingering death is not a life worth living. Not at all. It’s just torture. We should celebrate those that die quickly, along with the grief that will always come from losing someone we carry about.
I’d like to invent a hand-held suicide device that could be used by anyone who decides they have had enough. It would be cheap, plentiful and unstoppable against the religious nutters who think it’s wrong to take your own life. You could sneak this sucker in to the hospital and give it to your loved ones. They could then chose to end it all, doctors be damned. And nobody could do anything about it.
Oh, dang, guess that device already exists. Good thing I own a bunch of them. They just need to bring the price down a lot and make them more affordable for those that need them. But the bullets are still cheap enough.
The medical industry is also owned by the insurance industry and vice versa. Their ‘action plan’ for Americans is to force you to accept end-of-life treatment for as long as they can possibly keep you alive. The purpose is to not give you comfort and peace, but to extract as much money as they possibly can. If you’ve got great health insurance, you’ll get the works, if not, they’ll extract what your plan allows and then cast you aside. Violate their rules and end your own life and they will nullify your life insurance which you paid into for a lifetime. Ooops! Can’t have that! Sorry, your survivors get nothing!
In my opinion, this is just another symptom of American denial. We do our level damnedest to avoid reality and to never, ever discuss or attempt to deal with what is wrong. Push climate change off to the next generation. Push the consequences of unhealthy living off to our old age. Push off the costs of genetically modified foods, herbicides, Roundup, animal hormones and crappy diets off to “later”. Hopefully “it won’t happen to us” until it actually always does.
Thank god for my wife, who has helped me enormously to live healthier. My injuries and pain are all physical disabilities which I cannot do anything about. But diet is something I can do something about. And keeping a gun handy when the Reaper starts knocking. She held up real well until it was time to say goodbye, because she knows that she will not see her father again. It’s really hurts me to see her pain.
I never bring my family into this blog for the reason that it’s really nobody’s damned business, but I’m sharing this with all of you today because there are important lessons you should learn. Don’t believe that medical care is always ‘best’. I was diagnosed for daily radiation treatments for 6 weeks – which I found out from the Mayo Clinic would have been one of the worst thing for me and would not have done anything except make things worse. But they sensed an financial opportunity and tried to seize it. I had researched this thoroughly myself and realized that this treatment definitely not the right treatment. Ironically, I was already at the Mayo Clinic when they called and tried to setup my treatment schedule. I rudely declined their brand of daily torture. Surgery was what I needed and I was in the right place to get it. But those days are now passed, I can’t get any more even though I still need it on my back.
Not all health care is healthy, but it all begins at conception – what you eat MATTERS, quite a lot. You can avoid all kinds of horrible diseases and end-of-life torture by simply learning to eat healthy. It’s shocking, but not many people will bother with this. Mostly because they are astoundingly lazy and indifferent, even to their own bodies. They also don’t know how, and the supermarkets make it far, far worse. Nearly everything in the store (any store) is deadly, toxic and actually poisonous now. They still call it food but they should rightly call it disease. Because it’s all being grown with toxic, carcinogenic chemicals these days. Especially meat, and dairy, but also true of all canned, dried, packaged and frozen foods. You simply cannot eat healthy at a store or a restaurant unless you vigorously hunt down the certified organic products.
And they “cheat” on the labels constantly. Just like the liars, frauds and hucksters in the storable food industry, the supermarket profiteers are doing the same thing. They often lie about what is in the food, using bland-sounding names to fool the consumer, and fake advertising on the labels that it’s “healthy”. Quite frankly, almost none of it actually is. If you want to learn how to get smart about what you should eat, READ. I like Dr. McGregor’s book, “How Not To Die”, but there are many more good sources freely available online. Shop only in the vegetable and produce aisles. Read the labels.
The end of life should not be a torture chamber of endless, needless suffering, enriching the medical industry. Even if you brought this all upon yourself. We can certainly do better.
