The author, Toby Campbell, is writing as a palliative care consultant about a patient with a neurological disease. Keith fell out of his wheelchair and broke his clavicle. This led to his breathing being weakened.
"We decided during the consultation that Keith would not be ventilated and that he was at peace with dying," Campbell writes.
In other words, they discussed Keith committing suicide. Keith had resigned himself to dying during that conversation. He was started on a he was started on a BiPAP machine, something similar to what people with sleep apnea use at night, and sent home to die,
The problem was that he didn't die. After three months and three good-bye celebrations, he "began to despair" because he required BiPAP and others to care for him. Well, as the article implies, who would want to live like that?
He writes, "We talked openly about his options for taking control of his end-of-life care, including stopping positive pressure ventilation."
I don't understand why Campbell had to visit Keith's to discuss flipping a switch on a machine that, according to the story, everyone wanted to flip. At any time in those three months Keith could have simply stopped using the BiPAP. Was this really, then, a discussion about end-of-life care or a physician giving him permission to, or even talking him into, committing suicide?
Patients don't need doctors to die. Sadly, Keith and those who loved him were counting the minutes until it happened, and didn't want to have to count very long.
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