There was a report in the newspaper a few years ago about a priest who had been in a chronic respirator dependence ward of the hospital where he served for many years due to coma, respiratory failure, and tracheotomy. The hospital orders cakes every year to celebrate the priest's birthday, and this year it even issued a press release inviting reporters to interview and broadcast.

My heart was extremely sad when I saw such news. At that time, I had the urge to write to the media the next day to express my dissatisfaction with the priest’s situation and my dissatisfaction with the excessive medical treatment that harmed human dignity. At that time, I The title of the article I was thinking of was: I decided not to do it due to certain factors. To this day, every time I think of that priest, I still feel angrily.

This priest has been working and dedicating himself to the poor, vulnerable, and lonely people in Taiwan from young to old. Such a selfless good man, when he has finished his life obligations and is unconscious and unable to breathe, we Instead of allowing him to return safely to the embrace of the Lord, they used life-sustaining medical treatment to make him lie in the hospital bed all day long, relying on a respirator and a nasogastric tube to survive, living a life of a vegetative and robot with no quality of life and no dignity. .

I think of what my mother said in her life: When a person is old, if he cannot move and has to be pooped, peeed, turned over, given a bath, or force-fed, that is a "bad life". How can a good person change? Will it harm my life? Who made the priest who could have gone to heaven, but was forced to stay on earth to suffer and even die a good death?

Celebrating a birthday is originally a joyful event. Not only the birthday girl is happy, but the attendees are also happy. However, don’t you find this unusual birthday event strange? I would like to ask, can the priest eat the luxurious cake specially ordered for him? When everyone sings happy birthday loudly, is the priest happy? The irony is that this hospital actually invited reporters to report it. I can't help but wonder what the hospital's motives are?

A few months ago, a friend said sincerely: "People are inferior to animals" in Taiwan. Her own dog was sent to the hospital due to illness. The doctor said that her dog had an incurable disease and would die soon. , I hope she will be mentally prepared.

One night in the middle of the night, she found her dog sleeping, so she went to the emergency room with the furry baby in her arms. She was unwilling to let her beloved dog suffer, so that night she asked the veterinarian to let her dog go. Euthanasia.

She said that in Taiwan, people at the end of their lives are about to die. Instead of allowing the terminally ill patients to undergo euthanasia, their families use all possible means to make the family members at the end of their lives suffer the torment of modern medical treatment. The results of first aid are , either died in a miserable state or became an even more miserable vegetative state.

In fact, euthanasia is very controversial. There are only a few countries in the world where euthanasia is legal. We don’t need euthanasia. We only demand a dignified natural death. But in Taiwan, we can’t even think about it. Having a natural death is a luxury. One of the reasons is that our health insurance benefits are too exorbitant, and families do not have to bear too many expenses for ineffective medical treatment. The other reason is that the relationship between doctors and patients is not good, and doctors are afraid of being entangled by their families. Or they file complaints randomly, so they do a lot of defensive or ineffective medical treatment. The third reason is that some family members lack medical knowledge and dare not face the immutable laws of life, old age, illness and death in reality, and live in unrealistic expectations. The fourth reason is that some medical personnel lack bioethics, do not understand the true purpose of medical treatment, and do not understand the identification of the end of life, so they make medical actions that have no substantial benefit to patients at the end of life.

I often think that if medical benefits come from the suffering of these end-of-life patients, then this kind of money is really "suffering money." Unfortunately, there are still many hospitals and doctors in Taiwan who are making such a miserable fortune. The National Health Insurance Bureau spends a huge amount of money on such patients every year, and this kind of ineffective medical treatment not only causes pain to the patients, but also wastes medical resources. Some patients even occupy beds for a long time, making it difficult for people who really urgently need medical treatment to find a bed.

In the chronic respirator ward, you can often see red envelopes and greeting cards given to patients by their families. These are meaningless acts because the patients have no way to enjoy them.

A patient who was clearly conscious, bedridden, had long-term excretion of stool, and had bedsores and had to use a respirator for half a year wrote a passage to his son that made people’s noses sore, that is──

Please don’t lose your dear family members because you are reluctant to bear them. Using this kind of torture-like life-sustaining equipment to keep a family member at the end of his or her life is showing mercy rather than love. If the family member really loves this family member, please put yourself in his (her) shoes and let him (her) Get rid of the pain as soon as possible and return to the spiritual kingdom of his or her faith.

Companionship is not something that should be shown to others only when a family member’s life has reached its end, and it is definitely not considered filial to just hire a foreign helper to accompany your parents. I don’t want to see the sad red envelopes, sad greeting cards, or even sad cakes in the ward again.

"Don't do to your loved ones what you don't want others to do to you." If you don't want ineffective medical treatment to happen to you, please don't give it to those who love us most in the name of filial piety or love. Relatives.