eli5: Patients in hospice care are often unconscious due to high doses of sedative drugs, and are given no intravenous fluids, which leads to death by dehydration. Why is this done? Is there any difference between this and physician-assisted suicide?
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My father never made it to a hospice as he died the day before has was to go. (We were kind of managing to look after him at home.)
His pain gradually got worse and we slowly increased him morphine dose to deals with the pain.At the same time he gradually refused food and water. Both caused him pain.
So, by the end, he was getting a high dose of morphine and very little nutrition. His death was inevitable because of that. But it was anyway because of the cancer so increasing his morphine at least made his last weeks as comfortable as possible.
So yes, we kind of killed him. What we were doing was very clearly going to kill him. But there was no good alternative.
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