Knocking on heavens door

Naturally there was enormous outrage yesterday when an expert suggested that care homes should be able to opt out of attempting to resuscitate elderly patients.

Many said that this was ageist. I agree, however death happens to be ageist as well.

I doubt there are many occasions of an elderly person moving into a care home and not dying before they are moved out again. Lets be realistic here. Elderly people do not go to a care home to get better, they go there to receive care (as they can no longer care for themselves) until they die.

I think what many people are doing (including Doctors) is confusing medical care with personal care. The human body will always fail at some point. You can increase a persons life by giving them medical treatment but effectively you're just plugging holes in a dam that's about to burst.

In England an elderly person gets free medical care but unless they have no money whatsoever they have to pay for their personal care. Am I the only person that thinks this is the wrong way round?
I'm all for making sure that elderly people are cared for and kept warm etc. but I don't see the point of wasting medical care on someone that has reached the 'seventh stage' already (As You Like It - William Shakespeare).

To give you a very personal example, my grandmother had a lump on her breast which the doctors opted to remove when she was 83. She had mild dementia but the doctors chose to proceed with the operation regardless.
The general anesthetic caused further damage to her already fragile mind and she was no longer capable to look after herself. She had to go into a nursing home and died within two years of the operation. I firmly believe that if she hadn't have had the operation, the dementia wouldn't have kicked in as strongly as it did and she would probably still be alive today. She would admittedly be dying from breast cancer but at least she would still know who she was and who her family were when they came to visit (well most of the time anyway).
The doctors only saw it from the perspective of 'we are doctors, we must cure cancer' they didn't actually think about what was best for the patient or their family.

This is all part of the same problem relating to assisted suicide. If a person knows they are terminally ill and it is a question of when rather than how, shouldn't they have the option of ending it before the illness distorts who they are?

Talking from personal experience there are few things more heart wrenching than seeing someone you love fail to register who you are, or becoming a mere shadow of who they once were.

I certainly don't want to go on living when I'm not 'me' anymore. Of course by that point I won't be able to make the choice.