CORNER BENCH MEMOS MAGAZINE
My Husband Killed Himself.
I’d Like You to Know Why.
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| Dennis Prager, author and radio talk show host |
by DENNIS PRAGER
January 31, 2017 12:00 AM
The government has made it almost impossible to prescribe desperately needed painkillers. Last week, my two stepsons’ father, a man who loved life, killed himself. I would like to tell you why.
Two years ago, a 62-year-old father of three named Bruce Graham was standing on a ladder, inspecting his roof for a leak, when the ladder slipped out from under him. He landed on top of the ladder, on his back, breaking several ribs, puncturing a lung, and tearing his intestine, which wasn’t detected until he went into septic shock.
Following surgery, he lapsed into a two-week coma. In retrospect, it’s unfortunate that he awoke from that coma, because for all intents and purposes, his life ended with that fall. Not because his mind was affected; his mind was completely intact until the moment he took his life.
His life ended because, while modern medicine was adept enough to keep him alive, it was unable or unwilling to help him deal with the excruciating pain that he experienced over the next two years. And life in constant, excruciating pain, with no hope of ever alleviating it, is not worth living.
As a result of the surgery, Bruce developed abdominal scar-tissue –– structures known as adhesions. Adhesions can be horribly painful, but they are difficult to diagnose because they don’t appear in imaging, and no surgery in America or in Mexico, where out of desperation he also sought treatment, could remove them permanently.
Many doctors dismiss adhesions, regarding the patient’s pain as psychosomatic. The pain prevented him from getting adequate sleep. Nor could he eat without causing the pain to spike for hours. By the time of his death, he had lost almost half his body weight.
Prescription painkillers — opioids — relieved much of his pain, or at least kept it to a tolerable level. But after the initial recuperation period, no doctor would prescribe an opioid despite the fact that this man had a well-documented injury and no record of addiction to any drug, including opioids.
Doctors either wouldn’t prescribe them on an ongoing basis, because they feared losing their medical license or being held legally liable for addiction or overdose, or because they deemed Bruce a hypochondriac.
The federal government and states such as California have made it extremely difficult for physicians to prescribe painkillers for an extended period of time. The medical establishment and government bureaucrats have decided that it is better to allow people to suffer terrible pain than to risk exposing them to the danger of opioid addiction.
They believe it is better to allow any number of innocent people to suffer hideous pain for the rest of their lives than to risk having any patient getting addicted and potentially dying from an overdose.
Dr. Stephen Marmer, who teaches psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, told me that when he was an intern, he treated children with terminal cancer — and even they were denied painkillers lest they become addicted.
Pain management seems to be the Achilles’ Heel of modern medicine — for philosophical reasons as well as medical reasons.
Remarkably, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine last year that “whereas the benefits of opioids for chronic pain remain uncertain, the risks of addiction and overdose are clear.”
Isn’t accidental death from overdose, while allowing patients to have some level of comfort, preferable to a life of endless severe pain?
To most of us, this is cruel. Isn’t accidental death from overdose, while allowing patients to have some level of comfort, preferable to a life of endless severe pain?
Though I oppose suicide on religious and moral grounds and because of the emotional toll it takes on loved ones, I make an exception for people with terrible, unremitting pain.
If that pain could be alleviated by painkilling medicines, and laws or physicians deny them those medicines, it is they, not the suicide, who are morally guilty.
Bruce was ultimately treated by the system as an addict, not worthy of compassion or dignity.
On the last morning of his life, after what was surely a long, lonely, horrific night of sleeplessness and agony, Bruce made two calls, two final attempts to acquire the painkillers he needed to get through another day. Neither friend could help him. Desperate to end the pain, he picked up a gun, pressed it to his heart, and pulled the trigger. In a final noble act, he did not shoot himself in the head, even though that is the more certain way of dying immediately. He had told a friend some weeks earlier that if he took his life, he didn’t want loved ones to experience the trauma-inducing mess that shooting himself in the head would leave. Instead, he shot himself in the heart.
An autopsy confirmed the presence of abdominal adhesions, as well as significant arthritis in his spine. May Bruce Graham rest in peace. Some of us, however, will not live in peace until physicians’ attitudes and the laws change.
[Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, was published by Regnery. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com. © 2017 Creators.com ]
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444416/my-stepsons-father-killed-himself-painkillers-denied-life-not-worth-living
