Good morning...I think this conversation would be better placed on the SOS Forum...here is just one link from previous threads regarding assisted suicide...http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...sisted+Suicide

and another one...


http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...sisted+Suicide



If you do an advanced search, you will find others there. I do understand my friend and would feel very much the same given your circumstances.

Hello, Alffe: Thanks for your latest contribution.

I, too, believe the discussion belongs on the suicide board. Should I cut and paste my note there? What's the best way to go? Thanks.

Tom, I left you a message.

My heart goes out to you. I too have lost a daughter. I joined final exit 6 years ago. I have some thoughts on that mattter on a more private site. I usually do not discuss in public any issue like that just becasue it scares people and is controvercial. Take care, I wish you all the best and I wish you were not in pain. ginnie

I too lost a daughter and am a big fan of Final Exit.

Nineteen years ago when my wife was pregnant with what we thought to be our fourth child she miscarried. I remember the sobbing so clearly that we shared as we went to the doc's office, have the miscarriage confirmed and to be sent home. As I drove, we held hands, knowing the promise held by this chapter of our lives had, seemingly cruelly, been drawn to an abrupt close.
Fortunately for us, our doc had neither recommended nor performed the usual DNC to purge that which had been.

Weeks later, my wife still felt pregnant and wondered what was going on. She dialed the doc, we were asked to come in. Doc did some preliminary checking, shaking her head, wondering whether there was a tumor [cancer] growing where once there had been a vital child en ventre sa mer. Now, the technology of ultrasound was still fairly new in those years and the doc quickly made arrangements to perform it herself right then and there. Fearing the worst, we were moved to another room for the procedure. At once, the pictures crossing the screen revealed not a dreaded tumor, but a most viable little girl whose heart was beating strongly. Cleo had been pregnant with fraternal twins [our second set of twins] and only one had miscarried. Our miracle baby, Em, was still there very strongly making her presence known.

Now we were drawn so energetically away from the stages of grief regarding our lost baby to the dawning realization that another was still there and healthy, to boot. This was one that was written up in the medical journals as an issue for practitioners to alert to when miscarriage is presented, you see, since our doc always, always performed post miscarriage DNC but did not with Em in there. She felt for some reason that our grief being so profound that the added trauma of DNC was not warranted this time. God reached down and touched her shoulder warding her off because another had yet to come.

So, years later, Em will still ponder as do we her lost twin. Yes, there has been grief and loss even by Em regarding her lost twin; but we also celebrate the eternal joy of the miracle of Em's continued growth and arrival, now a vibrant and spunky daughter who is 4.0 in her first year of college with a hope to one day be a doctor herself.

The veil separating death from life is so tenuous, so easily breached that I have now and again found myself being drawn to Tom's thread even in recent months as I, in profound depression, contemplated deeply the questions Tom has posed for all of us to consider. Now healthier myself emotionally and mentally, I share my gratitude for each of your posts sharing moments and deeply held thoughts openly with us who here abide.

Tom, I have hope for you that the specialist with whom you work will be guided to the source of your overwhelming discomfort so that a means to overcome the source might become visible as the solution you have long sought. I pray those biopsies present roadmaps to the solution, and I await with anticipation the results just as you do.

Oh, and Tom and David, I took a moment to listen to each of your linked musical selections..... so beautiful and alluring. They cause one to think.

Blessings on all of you for the New Year,
Mark56

Sometimes people are not given all the information on compassionate organizations, or there is a mis-truth being passed about. The group I belong to is about living well while we can. They present the newest advances info on MS, PN,. The organization put out a fantastic letter this month entitled Palliation, research is given on prostrate cancer,melanoma trial results, ms about "gilena" findings, melanoma and braf-.canabinoids in lateral sclerosis, cronic fatique and virus clues. All this from an organization that is associated only with end of life issues. That is far from the truth. I did look into most of the groups in the world. I joined this particular one over a decade ago. I intend to live a long, and as comfortable life as I can. I will be here many years if I have my say. Yet I wanted assurances, more information, more compassion. Read this months issue of Final Exit. It has good people in this organization also, or I would not have joined. What is different, is that you can really say whats on your mind and somebody listens. ginnie I do not encourage endings, but learning, and ending my own fears. I am not real big on prolonged sufferings. I do have advanced directives legally in place too.

Tom, death is not the answer to what ails us. We cannot help others nor ourselves by trying to take, what we think is, "the easy way out". You are still a young man being I'm 64 and have a lot of life still in me. Don't give into the words "old age", it's a mind thing. "As a man thinketh, so is he". I use to have very bad pains in my legs to the point of my right knee giving out on me. I am not one to take medication except once in a while an Excedrin. I found other alternatives to medicine. I changed my diet....when we reach a certain age there are some foods our body can no longer handle. I eat more fruits and vegetables now and have totally taken red meat out of my diet. I use to walk and exercise a lot, but I felt I over did it. I had to learn to balance life out, and learn to listen to my body. Your body tells you what it needs, believe it or not. I also (please don't think that I'm crazy, but) talked to my pain, because I believe we all have the power within to heal ourselves, we just have to change our thinking.
We never know what life will deal us, but we have to be prepare to deal with life and choose to change it around to benefit us to the best we can with whatever situation we face. I have observed so many people, old and young faced with horrific conditions, however they beat the odds by choosing to live their lives to the fullest in the condition they are dealing with, for instance Steven Hawking. Hawking has a neuro-muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years and has left him almost completely paralysed, however his brain is still functioning and he is still teaching other people with what function he has left. He's looking at life with respect to it and choosing to 'live' it to best he can with what he has left of it. I hope you choose to live life to it's fullest and not shorten it, because you don't know what you mean to someone else in your life.
God bless you and keep talking and sharing with others.
....ask not what have you done for me lately, but what have I done for you lately... Rakeitha

Rakeitha:

I am so glad you wrote what you did. I'm a big believer in putting good stuff in our bodies.

Thanks for writing what you did. When I first came on this thread and read the various postings, the first thing that popped into my head was Steven Hawking, a man stuck in a body that is practically frozen, but his mind is on a different level than all of us.

I don't know how he has lasted so long, but God Bless that man.

Mel

Hello, Rakeitha and Melody: Thank you both immensely for your posts.

Melody, I do eat well, a full and balanced diet. Too much sugar and salt, no doubt. Sprouts? Your prior message was the first time I ever heard of them. No doubt I could improve things by eating better; the question is, how much better? Yes, I believe in alternative medicine, and did yoga (Hatha) for 6 months or so. I take homeopathic medicine now. It's just that, well, at the end of the day, the thought keeps reappearing: my time has come. I know that people here refer to suicide as the "beast." I would say that taking one's life when the time comes, is not suicide; hence, the beast is either absent altogether or of an entirely different nature.

Rakeitha, you mention Steven Hawking. He is a hero to me -- much as Johnny Weismuller was to all us kids in the polio ward (he had polio and went on to become a world champion swimmer). Such people move the goalposts for everybody else; indeed, they provoke changes OF, not just IN, the game. Yet there is a price to be paid, even in their case: go to http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=577 for another person's view, i.e., his ex-wife.

No, I don't feel bad because I am "old;" I feel old because I feel bad. I looked around for a quote from Hawking on suicide, and couldn't find one. I wonder if anybody has ever bothered to ask him about it: Dave, talk about the elephant in the room -- that one is no elephant, he's a mammoth!