Ending one's life sustaining system

Euthanasia is not allowed in Sweden. It is illegal and can be seen as murder. Even the acceleration of death through pain-alleviating medicine is illegal if " it accelerates death more than it alleviates pain", wrote Hans Thorstedt of the Faculty of Law, Stockholm University. On the other hand, passive euthanasia " in the form of forbearance to initiate life-sustaining treatment in a hopeless case is legal". But the Swedish state of law is not that clear when it is legal or illegal to terminate a life-sustaining system. The issue lies on the border of what is active and passive euthanasia.

I came face to face with the problem of euthanasia. But no one will admit that the decision to end a patient's life-sustaining treatment was in fact an act of euthanasia. In this particular case, it was the children of the patient who asked that their mother no longer get life sustenance through the tube. This decision was made clear to the nursing staff. It would have been just another case of palliative care except that some objections were raised by some staff members who saw the decision as an act of passive euthanasia.

It became a strong psychological issue to get involve in a passive euthanasia case. Several care staffers refused to be involved and a feeling of mental illness slowly affected the working place. When the issue was raised to the leadership of the nursing home, one division chief stated that the decision to end the patient's life sustenance was a deviation from the practice of caring after a patient until his/her life span comes to a natural end.

There have been publicized cases of euthanasia although not in Sweden. For instance, a 35-year old Swede who went to a Swiss euthanasia clinic. Often, they are patients suffering from extreme pains following an accident or a terminal illness like cancer. The patients themselves ask to end their life-sustaining treatment. But when they come face-to-face with death, they change their decisions.

In any case, when this particular issue had infected seriously the working climate of the nursing home, the decision to start the process of ending the patient's life sustaining system became a medical one and no longer the expressed wish of the patient's children. The problem with the medical diagnose is that, there was none in the beginning. There was no medical investigation to substantiate the decision to remove the food tube for sustaining life. The palliative care consisted mainly of morphine and water, supposedly to alleviate pain which the patient may or may not have suffered from.

Euthanasia, whether active of passive are generally in the domain of hospitals. So that when it had happened in a long-term nursing home, one can imagine the magnitude of digression that had taken place. The patient may have found peace and an end to a life without cure, but the psychological and mental discomfort it had created among those who were involved against their will last a long time.