Originally Posted by ol'cs

Just like our disease, and our personalities, our lives are all so different. I'll bet that anyone with an established life, support of family, financial independence, and all the coping skills in the world, plus early in this disease will and can feel a sense of hope. For those who are treated like they "aren't disabled", broke, abandoned by most family and friends, swamped with "things to do" often just to eat and find a warm place to be, and otherwise "crippled" by thousands of possible things going bad, or wrong, or just pain, depression, and the inability to move, and are advanced and alone to cope by themselves, undermedicated, death seems like a release. You who know what i'm talking about, often never post, but still read this forum. Drugs can buy you a few years, but won't halt progression. In the USA, if you are below the poverty line, you are on the street, unmedicated, and have no access to a computer like US, the more fortunate YPWP, life IS NOT worth living. No amount of talk will or can even send a kind word their way. It is not for me that i posted this thread, it is for the forgotten, those who suffer in this country, like tsunami victims, or war victims. Pure despair. No more reason to live. Now i still have reasons to be alive and my pains are adequately taken care of by drugs that i can still afford, and i can pay for my drugs, and i can afford a roof over my head, and still keep warm and adequately fed and have a nestegg for the future when PD stops my breathing.
I fear for a country that doesn't care for it's chronically ill and wants to cut 1 trillion from medicaid. It is similar to those who come back from war, beaten and psychologically suffering silent trauma, losing everything, and nowhere to go and nobody to care about them. They might as well end their lives, because they shoot horses, don't they?

Originally Posted by reverett123

...to me, at least, that the US is one of the worst countries in the world to be if you have a serious, incureable illness. The tiny bit of safety net that exists is constantly under threat from some jerk who thinks that he will live forever and so, in his selfishness, stands ready to the even those shreds to his simpleton followers to advance his own career. To hell with the lot of them.