My brother David died recently in the care of the NHS. His death was not their fault: no one can do anything about bone cancer except alleviate the pain. Which is what they spectacularly failed to do.
Bone cancer does not kill you. It just hurts like hell and your bones become so fragile that coughing breaks ribs. You have to wait for the disease to spread to an organ, the failing of which will kill you. Or you can hope for pneumonia, ‘the old man’s friend’, to finish you off.
Either way, you should not have to endure months of pain and die in agony. Pain relief is possible, and many hospices and a few hospitals (notably the Royal Marsden) manage a patient’s dying days with compassion and palliative drugs (notably morphine) tailored to the patient’s pain. But most do not.
Hospices have a better reputation. Their aim is to aid a peaceful death. Hospitals, on the other hand, are tasked with keeping the patient alive, however much he suffers.
David was eventually given morphine. The blessed relief would last three hours, but the nurses would be unable to give him his next dose for another hour. So out of every four hours, one would be spent in groaning, crying, sometimes begging, agony. Consultants see their patients rarely and briefly. If they saw them in extremis, pity might move them to increase the dose — something the ward staff, who must deal with the pleading and crying, cannot do. It must be hell for the nurses; hell also for the other patients in the ward; distressing beyond measure for the family. And torture for the patient.
You would not treat a dog like that. And if you did, the RSPCA would rightly prosecute you for willful cruelty and neglect.
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