Foreign Perspectives

We’ve had a small run of deaths in the family lately which has set me thinking just how long you should consider prolonging a life.

In the past, prolonging a life generally meant a reasonably short lengthening so the issue of quality of life didn’t really enter into matters. Prolonging a life a few months or perhaps a few years seemed like a “good thing”. After all, there were painkillers to relieve any major pain so you weren’t torturing the person in any sense.

However, these days it’s quite a different matter. If you’ve a disease like malignant Mesothelioma you could potentially be living for years yet get to the point quite quickly where you were effectively a vegetable to those around you. That’s how my uncle spent his last decade of “life”. Was it worthwhile prolonging his “life” that extra decade? Well, consider the impact of having done just that….

For a start, he had a number of minor strokes over that decade so he was in to hospital just about every one of those years. Minor strokes don’t seem so bad but each one destroys part of your brain so as time went on there was less of him there. When we left for France some six years or so ago he could move his hand and in rare moments would stumble across the name of someone close to him that was visiting him in the nursing home. Last year, he could neither move nor speak.

Possibly more noticeable was that ten years back he was able to walk and see various friends and family now and again. Granted, his mind wasn’t all there at that time but aside from wandering out at all hours and thinking that every day was Sunday, he managed to get by quite well. In his final years he only saw his sisters briefly each week and never saw any other friends or family. In the eulogy at his funeral service the massive difference between his early life travelling the world and the final decade couldn’t have been more striking.

On the other hand, consider my cousin Harold. He’s been diabetic since he was 13 which sounds really awful and to some extent that’s certainly true. However, that didn’t stop him having quite a full life right up until a few weeks ago. Whilst he didn’t get to travel the world as Andy had, he certainly had a lot of good times with his family right throughout his life. Oh, sure, the diabetes was a major hassle causing him to lose his toe and his kidneys to close down but keeping him alive throughout that time did give him quite a good quality of life and indeed a good life (“quality of life” rarely means that, of course).

Prolonging a life that’s reasonably good does seem worthwhile. The snag is that there’s a tendency to prolong it way, way beyond that time these days, simply because we can.

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One of the problems with technological disease creations like Mesothelioma is that it just wasn’t appreciated at the time that working with things like asbestosis would subsequently cause all kinds of incurable diseases.

Although it sounds obvious to us that having loads of asbestosis fibres knocking around your workplace and home isn’t a good idea, that was the best solution available at the time. Even now, there are many people who have ironing boards with those little asbestosis panels for the iron. Have you even thought about that? I know that we didn’t until we tried to get rid of ours and it ain’t so easy to do.

Similarly, it seems laughable that various extremely harmful products were openly advertised as not only being something that you should buy, but as things that you should buy because they were good for your health. It might sound crazy but not so long ago that was the case with cigarettes. Look at a film from the 1950s and it’s quite staggering how many of the characters were smoking.

One wonders what “safe” product we all use will have major league health problems in the years to come. My bet is that mobile phones will be figuring in the legal claims in a few decades time but I’m sure there’ll be other equally dangerous products around at the moment.

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One of the hassles of getting older is that you start having to look for the best wrinkle serum to try and get rid of those pesky wrinkles.

Sadly, it’s not, yet, possible to actually remove the wrinkles but that will come in due course as there’s a growing tide of money looking into this issue as one would expect given the changing global demographics.

In the meantime though, it’s the most unintrusive cover that you need to look for.

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