Morality and End of Life Issues

Mossome · New User Joined: 24 Oct 2006 Posts: 1

Thanks for your attention to this matter. The situation is that I have a mother that is 65 years old and suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and Breast Cancer that may have spread to other parts of the body. I will be attending the doctors appointment and finding out more info tomorrow. It is almost certainly in her bones and may have spread to the lung based upon suspicious areas of the CAT scan report. Her Alzheimer’s is likely in the middle stages. She has had the disease for about 10 years and also had her father die of the disease but he made it for 20 years from first signs to the end. My mother has recently broken her leg twice at the femur. Once initially and then again after the surgery to repair the first break. As of now she is recovering from that surgery.

Just a quick word on Alzheimer’s, it is a disease that can last from anywhere from 2-20 years depending on the speed of progression. It generally starts with mild, but not normal forgetfulness and develops over time to more severe dementia and eventually the brain will lose it’s ability to do simply tasks and towards the end will lose the capacity to control basic motor functions of the body. It’s not real debilitating at the beginning but in the end it’s very much so.

My mother still has basically the same personality but cannot remember things for much longer than 2 minutes. She recognizes familiar faces and names but in the later stages she will lose that ability as well. She isn’t in any constant pain other than recovering from her leg surgery. She is in no pain from her cancer but does get confused exactly what is going on with the cancer and sometimes forgets that she even has it, which is probably a blessing. My mother is a very religious person and likes to associate with people of her same age or older as has always been her personality. She still says that she wants to live into her 70’s and when she realizes that she has cancer she does mention that she is in no pain and would consider going through chemotherapy treatments. She has been through it before but I am not sure she remembers the difficult task it is to get through the treatments.

As of now my family is not completely agreeing with the course of action that should be taken depending on the news we find out tomorrow with the extent and stage of the cancer. The way it looks my mother’s power of attorney might disagree with what should be done versus what the other children want to do. We have a lot of news to find out but decision time will be coming soon.

What it might come down to is whether or not to continue treatments for her cancer not knowing exactly what effects the chemotherapy might have. We are still not sure what the benefits are of the therapy versus the downfalls. We are also not sure what is considered a good quality of life and whether or not it’s worth it to try to prolong her life by having chemotherapy done or to just stop the treatments and let nature run it’s course. This is a complicated decision. Is it more immoral to do treatments that may have an unknown benefit or is it immoral to just give up hope in efforts to maybe spare a lot of suffering in the future. On the other hand if 1-5 years (for arguments sake) of a somewhat good to average quality of life can possibly be salvaged is it worth the attempt? Is it better to just let go and allow some pain and suffering to be avoided but with a quicker mortality to be the likely result.

The power of attorney has ultimate authority but seems to be in the minority with the rest of the family and possibly my mother’s wishes. My mother agreed to a no recessitate order or for her not to be hooked to machines to be kept alive but didn’t agree to any kind of an order to cease treatments for her conditions.

If you were in this situation what would be your opinion and what would you do from this point forward. I don’t want to give my opinion on this yet before getting more opinions.

AlaskaAngel · Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 12:07 am Post subject: bc and morality

I hope that by now you and the others involved have more information about the realities of your mother's situation. I would like to help, perhaps starting by helping to interpret some of the information you have received about her bc and treatment.

Sincerely,

AlaskaAngel

Cindy · Senior User Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 167

Hmmm, that's a tough one. I'm really sorry to hear about your mom's circumstance. I am a caregiver for my mom and I know how tough things can be in making decisions. My stepdad had alzheimers. He had to go into a nursing home because he was becoming violent. He also had respiratory disease. Family just let is run its course until he was gone. If it were MY mom...I would do everything I could to try and keep her going, but then I would have to ask myself if I were being selfish, in questioning what kind of quality of life it would give her? Tough, tough decision. I wish you well in your decision.
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