This is one smart lady.

I complained about all the death-with-dignity pressure to my father’s doctor, an Orthodox Jew, who said that his religion forbids the termination of care but that he would be perfectly willing to “look the other way” if we wanted my father to die. We didn’t. Then a light bulb went off in my head. We could devise a strategy to fend off the death-happy residents: We would tell them we were Orthodox Jews.

My little ruse worked. During the few days after I announced this faux fact, it was as though an invisible fence had been drawn around my mother, my sister and me. No one dared mutter that hateful phrase “death with dignity.”

Though my father was born to an Orthodox Jewish family, he is an avowed atheist who long ago had rejected his parents’ ways. As I sat in the ICU, blips on the various screens the only proof that my father was alive, the irony struck me: My father, who had long ago rejected Orthodox Judaism, was now under its protection.

As though to confirm this, there came a series of miracles. Just a week after he was rushed to ICU, my father was pronounced well enough to be moved out of the unit into North Shore‘s long-term respiratory care unit. A day later he was off the respirator, able to breathe on his own. He still mostly slept, but then he began to awaken for minutes at a time, at first groggy, but soon he was as alert (and funny) as ever. A day later, we walked in to find him sitting upright in a chair, reading the New York Times.

Seems a few of the residents want to decrease their patientload. Now, I’m sure we can all sympathize with people who are routinely put on 72-hour shifts. People who do most of the hospital’s heavy lifting (always excluding the nurses, because the nurses are always excluded).

But I don’t think any of us wants to watch a guy chasing a family down the hallway, begging for permission to end the suffering.

I know that euthanasia and assisted suicide are hot topics all over the world. But surely there’s a difference between doctors who qualified only in healing the sick deciding when to shove you through the doorway, particularly against the stated wishes of the family. No training whatsoever is provided to MDs for this type of task, which is one reason I would like to see a special profession develop around the issue, one that doesn’t have an obvious interest in the outcome of the patient, either economic (the US medical system) or or spiritual (the clergy). I want doctors to have a vested interest only in curing the patients.

Is that so wrong?

My own father made it very clear for very many years that he wanted a DNR order when he went into the hospital. Of course, his ex-wife reversed that when she tried to convince the medical staff they were still together, but the fact that I came every damn day and she high-tailed it back to Buttfuck Nowhere when I showed up led the nursing staff to trust my word against hers.

I made it equally clear that I did not want a DNR. From my family’s reaction, I obviously need to put this in writing, because every time the subject comes up they say, “You’d want to die with dignity.”

Fuck that.

They don’t have as much experience with hospitals as I do. Check dignity at the door. Keep the plugs in me because, by God, if you pull them I WILL COME BACK FOR YOU.

And I’ll get you, too. That’s another thing that runs in my family.