Unless, that is, you happen to be one of Ray Gosling’s unidentified lovers who happens to be seriously ill. Then you are very likely to find not only that you are an island, but a very small island; in fact a mere clod, about to be washed away by the sea – or, since it is more practical, smothered, while an obliging and obsequious doctor – would you Adam and Eve it – steps outside for a gasper.
Dr No is getting mightily fed up with the ludicrous death-fest that is currently being hosted by the BBC. Only a fortnight ago, we had auxiliary nurse Gilderdale withered by the Vine, hotly followed on the same night by an over-dressed dement ‘shaking hands with death’ in – of all places – the Royal College of Physicians of London. Now we have Ray ‘No Regrets’ Gosling doing a full on-camera confession number, followed in due course by spurious allegations that ‘everyone’ was at it. Oh really?
Don’t get Dr No wrong – he is quite sure that there is an important, even vital one might say, debate to be had about end of life decisions. In fact, he has even made his own modest contributions to the debate. What Dr No objects to is the strikingly one sided high profile celebrity infested nature of the BBC’s programming. Where, he asks, is the Panorama Programme ‘I helped my child live with love in my heart’? Where is the Reith Lecture ‘Shaking Hands with Life’?
No doubt in the cosy corridors of BBC power, where the muzak of political correctness pervades every thought, it seems cool, even hip, to be on the side of autonomy, on the side that says ‘my life, my death, my choice’. But real life isn’t like that – it’s just a little bit more complicated. There are other people involved:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
John Donne knew it in 1624. It is a pity the BBC have forgotten it in 2010.
For that matter where is the Panorama programme ‘I bumped off the elderly and kept my GMC registration,’ or ‘We let 1000 people die to get Foundation status’ or ‘We let Martin Ryan die of starvation and got away with it’?
I bet you any money that the government has already worked out how many old people will have to lay down their lives for their country in order to stop the pensions ‘time bomb’ as they so eloquently call it..
Note added by Dr No: Julie recently wrote an excellent related post – see here. Well worth a read.
Julie – exactly. There was someone from Auntie on R4 at lunchtime saying there didn’t get the allegations of bias – hadn’t they rolled out opposing points of view in many programmes? What she didn’t get is that it is bias on a gross, programme level scale. An opposing point of view here and there doesn’t alter the fact that the entire body of programming is in flood in the DYI (do-yourself-in) direction.
The Gosling story is weird. It is sort of playing hide and seek. It gets announced in the news bulletin, and then disappears from the main programme. George Pitcher (Telegraph) did a post and then pwoof! it had gone. There’s some stuff on the Daily Mail site about comments being censored to leave the pro-Gosling ones ‘because of the police investigation’. There seems to be an awful lot of smoke and mirrors around on this one.
Today’s top prize so far for crassness goes to an Independent Twit running under the name Matthew Norman. His piece has more holes in it than a Swiss Cheese, and the sub-title gives you a flavour: it calls Gosling murdering his bit on the side ‘a noble act of civil disobedience ‘. Since when did civil disobedience involve violence (people struggle when they are smothered) and murder?
500,000 of us die each year in England, and many undoubtedly suffer at the end – now, a ‘gold standard’, medically managed death, in a palliative care setting, never has, and never will be available to all of us – perhaps that is why some commentators become irritated by talk of a ‘good death’?
Even so at least 300,000 die in institutional settings each year (and the numbers are always rising) so it is unlikely that doctors and nurses will always be able keep a close eye on the Ray Goslings of this world, even if they wanted to?
There is no doubt that technology has created difficult ethical problems for medics including the best approach to the growing demands for greater control, even during the final breaths of life. Needless to say while this battle rages there are inevitably going to be casualties, including Ray Goslings dying lover, and now, judging by recent media reports possibly Ray Gosling himself?
On today’s Radio-5 program a woman described the death of her brother (I think it was) who also died of AIDs (while a patient at Chelsea & Westminster).
Her version of events depicted her dying brother alone in a side room with an opiate infusion controlled by relatives who were able to administer increments of ? diamorphine each time they were concerned about pain or distress.
The brother soon died after their ministrations and the relatives were left wondering what part, if any, their actions had played in his death – the lady rightly asked, was the drug mostly for the benefit of her brother, or the relatives?
A&E Charge Nurse – the numbers are indeed big, but your last point touches on ‘No Man is an Island’ – very few deaths happen in isolation. A death affects other people. Often guilt, sometimes long-lasting, affects a bereavement – that we somehow failed the dying person. That we weren’t there; didn’t call for the ambulance – or – given the loud chorus we hear and read in the media – didn’t put them out of their misery. ‘There’s not a day in the last twenty years when I haven’t regretted not helping my father go (or some other sanitising phrase)’. But the problem with this guilt is that it is usually going to happen anyway, and will just attach itself opportunistically to whatever it can find. So if you had bumped father off, then it is just as likely that the refrain would be ‘There’s not a day in the last twenty years when I haven’t regretted bumping Dad off – what if he had pulled through?’. Legalising assisted suicide and/or euthanasia wont stop that guilt happening: it will just change its focus.
Dr No also thinks any doctor who says to such relatives as you describe ‘This is the button to press‘ is somewhat shirking his responsibility. It dumps the decision neatly on the relative(s) – who may then have to manage years of uncertainty and guilt – while the doctor can, as Gosling said his lover’s doctor did, slink off and have a gasper while the deed is done.
As for Mr Gosling – well, Dr No is tempted to say that whatever else he may or may not have done, he has certainly cooked his own goose.
The podcast can be found here (see last anecdote in the ‘ministrations’ post)
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/5lnpi/5lnpi_20100217-0945a.mp3
The sister’s story begins straight after the introductory comments by Ray Gosling.
It is difficult to see how the legalisation of euthanasia in any form would not ultimately send a very strong message to relatives and carers that it is OK to do the “decent thing” for their “loved ones,“ for society, and sometimes for themselves to quietly kill at a time and in a way that no one would ever suspect foul play. “After all, it is no longer murder.” Much easier and more compassionate for everyone concerned than having to through the hassle and red tape of the “Euthanasia Committee” and to find a doctor willing to participate at “such a difficult time for the family.”
For this reason it is never possible to be sure of the numbers of illegal killings in a society where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalised.
I think the assisted suicide lobby are seeking a martyr and Ray Gosling has volunteered. They have a problem in that prosecutions are very rare in assisted suicide cases and they need an ‘outrage’ to use as their casus belli. I saw something like this in Scotland when Dr Ian Kerr, a Glasgow GP, was disciplined for supplying lethal medicine to a number of patients, in particular a business woman who was depressed. The media got right in on it, and several indignant letters were written into the Herald (scottish broadsheet) about it. Wisely, the usual opponents to assisted suicide did not rise to the bait, and they were left punching at thin air. I actually wonder if Ray Gosling is telling the truth about this, if this has happened at all. It just doesn’t quite ring true, and I’m not sure he would have stuck his neck out in this fashion if it was. It surely wouldn’t be that difficult to find out who he was talking about and what hospital. Bit like your Spartacus case, Dr No..
In Nazi Germany, the murder of mentally ill and disabled people started with one mercy killing (Gerhard Kretschmar) and ended up with an unknown number, mostly placed at between 100 000 and 250 000. This is partly because when the official programme ended, the killings did not, with a culture of euthanasia embedded into the medical and military establishments.