I am constantly blown away by this. I would never let an animal of mine, a dog, cat, or horse, suffer this way. But in this society we have this idea of "life at any cost" for human beings. I see this constantly: a woman with terminal breast cancer (which is excruciatingly painful) has to suffer right up to the bitter end. The doctor who gives her a humane and merciful OD of morphine is seen, and punished, as a killer. Concern over becoming an addict trumps concern over a life endured with chronic, disabling pain. Suicide is comprehensively seen as the result of distorted thinking produced by depression and mental illness. A family refuses to turn off the machines of a parent, child, or sibling in whom all meaningful brain activity has ceased. And in the middle of the greatest extinction crisis since the extirpation of the dinosauers, we're bogged down in quarrels over the ethics of using human embryos that were otherwise bound for the trash can in stem cell research, research that holds out the promise of alleviating the suffering of a life already on the planet.

I also wanted to add this to my original reply -- the three rules of coping with trouble.

1) Get your head out of your ***.
2) Calm down!
3) Pay attention.

Chris