eli5: if the substance of choice is legal, what stops one from getting intoxicated on their deathbed ?
In: Other
I’ll answer this from my experience as a community nurse who sees plenty of people in the last days of their lives.
Dying isn’t like it is on TV. You don’t tend to be awake and lucid one second and then close your eyes and are dead the next. That’s not how it works in most cases.
The actual process of dying can take anywhere from a few hours to days (sometimes even weeks). In this time your body is shutting down and bit by bit it stops being able to manage previously easy functions, such as swallowing. Most of the time you become unable to swallow anything without choking, meaning that for a lot of people during the last days of their lives they will be unable to eat or drink. Coupled with this is the fact that your body doesn’t really want to eat or drink anyway a lot of the time.
At the end of people’s lives we tend to give them medications (through a cannula under the skin bc like I’ve said, they probably won’t be able to swallow them) to control any symptoms they might have, such as pain. One of these symptoms is something called ‘terminal agitation’ where basically the person can become really anxious and unsettled. You obviously don’t want someone dying scared and agitated if you can help it, so we give anti-anxiety meds to settle them down. This, coupled with the fact that the body is winding down and shutting off, means a lot of the time the person won’t be awake enough on their last day to even have a conversation, let alone a drink.
So I guess it depends what you mean by their ‘deathbed’. If you mean the day they die, the answer is most people physically would be unable to get intoxicated at that point.
But if you mean say, their last few weeks when they know they’re dying, then the answer is: people do. Hospices for example regularly have bottles of people’s favourite alcohol in so they can have a drink whenever they want. I care for people in their own homes, so I regularly see palliative patients drinking whatever they enjoy whenever they want, because why not?
On a side note, we give people ‘mouth care’ when they’re no longer conscious enough or able to drink, to keep their mouths moist and comfortable. You do this by basically wiping a wet sponge on a stick around their mouths. I’ve know plenty of families to dip the sponges into a G&T or a whiskey etc., because that’s what their loved ones enjoy and they made it known that they’d like to have their favourite drink before they die.
Sorry for the long post, hope it helps!
TL;DR most people are physically unable to get fucked up when they’re at the very end of their lives, but palliative patients regularly do have as much of their favourite drinks as they want, bc at that point who cares?
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