"Quantity vs. Quality"
by Todd Hayen
"When my first wife was dying of cancer, I heard this a lot. The doctors would often ask, “Which do you want - quality of life, or to live longer?” Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they ever got that far and actually asked us that to our face. But it felt like they did, and certainly with the decisions we were making day in and day out, it was definitely on our minds. I would typically blurt out, “I want both! Dammit!” So did Janice.
But it was just as often made clear to us that we couldn’t have both, and that we had to choose one over the other. I still tended to go with quantity if I had to make a choice. Of course, that was easy for me; I wasn’t the one dying. So it was in my best interest to keep Janice around as long as I could. I knew if she was really suffering, I wouldn’t want that, but most of the actual pain I saw wasn’t that severe (thank God).
What was serious was the general pain-in-the-butt nature of everything: the chemo, the monthly trips to Chicago from LA, the lost hair, the lost money and time. It got pretty grueling for me as well, but nothing like what it was for her, poor thing. It was pretty horrible. It wasn’t until close to the end that it all became unbearable; then she couldn’t walk, was in a wheelchair, and her mind started to go.
After having experienced all of that, and being as ancient as I am now, I think for me I would definitely choose quality over quantity if I had to go through something similar today to what Janice went through twenty-five years ago. I just don’t know if it’s worth it to go through such pain and suffering for a few more moments of life. Is that sacrilegious? I don’t know, maybe it is. There was a time not that long ago when you didn’t have a choice between the two - you had to go with quality because there wasn’t any aggressive, life-prolonging treatment to buy you those extra days. You just had to bite the bullet and soon die, making the best of what you had left.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I am not advocating MAiD! I do not believe I would ever ask to be “taken out” - I would be more likely to ask for more morphine if I was in pain (and thus “naturally” go out in a fog!). But I hope I wouldn’t opt to take my own life. Or, more accurately, opt to have the state eliminate me and harvest whatever organs were still functioning.
A few generations before Janice’s and mine, you weren’t even given the bad news that your body was facing a challenge it would take a lot of intervention to surmount. Most people didn’t even know they had only months, weeks, or days to live. Technology was so absent back then that they didn’t even diagnose you until serious symptoms set in. You just didn’t wake up one day. Poof. You were gone.
That’s kind of the way I think I would prefer it. I sort of like the idea of just bopping along, happy as a lark, and then, if God decided it was my time, to get sick for a little bit and then expire. You didn’t have to worry or even be too sad about it all if you didn’t know what was coming until you got symptoms.
Way, way back there wasn’t anything you could do about it anyway. You made peace with your creator and then jumped off the spinning globe. (Of course, at that time most people believed the world was flat…hmmm). If you were religious, and were a decent person during your living days, you could look forward to sitting beside Jesus in the great beyond. I mean, really, what’s there not to like about that?
Of course, I know not everyone had a fun time of it. There were some pretty extended “dying times” and lots of suffering to go around. But still, you pretty much knew you were in for it with no options, and there wasn’t this touch-and-go crap with all this insane technological effort to keep your heart beating as long as possible. Nowadays, people can go for years with Father Death staring over their shoulder, lying awake at night wondering if the treatment is working, if the cancer will spread or return, wondering when the other shoe will drop.
Hell, you don’t even need to be diagnosed to lie awake with those fears. They surround us day in and day out. We are told constantly we could die any minute or at least catch something that will potentially kill us. We are encouraged from birth to go to the doctor, get checked up, get a flu shot every year, get shots for hepatitis, shots for shingles and if we travel anywhere, shots for typhus, for yellow fever, and God knows what else. All this along with the ridiculous number of shots we get before we are five years old. And it isn’t only vaccinations that are shoved down our throats; it is mammograms, colonoscopies, CT scans, MRIs, echocardiograms, ECGs, tests up the wazoo… “better safe than sorry.”
The medical industrial complex is always looking out for us, always ready with some new-fangled machine to save our lives, or more accurately, attempt to keep us alive just a little longer. As if that is the only thing we should be concerned about: quantity far surpasses quality - because quantity has the clearest price tag. And, as every civilized, scientific, person knows, there is no afterlife of any kind - this is it folks: when you die, you’re dead. Period.
And, of course, while the medical profession is trying to “treat us” in order to keep us alive, the rest of the system is trying to make us sick so the doctors can step in with their machines and patented chemicals to prolong life. I don’t need to get into that here as I have written a dozen or so articles about this over the past few years. Suffice it to say it is a pretty well-greased machine.
How did God intend for all of this to go? Well, that is difficult to say. Considering that intelligence, curiosity, and the passion humans have had to possess to create technology that can even attempt to do what the medical system does today were just as “God-created” as everything else. So maybe the way it is today is indeed God’s intention. Or maybe God didn’t expect people to stray away from Him as people have, and maybe if they had not, things would be a bit different. Ya think? You can bet your sweet bippy it would be."
