Quality_of_Life

There are things we see in life that make us question our own fate, direction, everything. Visiting my grandmother in the nursing home, among the wheelchairs and bedridden. To hear the crying and nonsense spewing forth from once intelligent mouths. Watching people, human beings, who had once been professional golfers, mothers, siblings, bikers, sons being handfed by overworked nursing staff, the pureed food dribbling down their chins and staining their clothes. Seeing people degraded to a mere shadow of what they had been by the common process of aging. In medical science we try so hard to help increase life expectancy, eradicating disease so we may spend more time experiencing and accumulating. If this is what the end of that expanded life is going to be though, perhaps we can’t do much beyond nature’s own course. I would rather be forced to have my life fit into 70 years than spend twenty extra locked into a wheelchair by a foam cushion with food dribbling out of my mouth accompanied by alzheimeric ramblings. We should be more interested in the quality of our lives, not the length. I have wasted much of my life until now, afraid of what might happen. Now I am afraid of what will happen if I try to extend it to make up for what I have not embraced. Even if the nursing home system was spectacular, would I even be aware' There are times that my grandmother still shines through, ornery and stubborn, humorous and feisty, but most of the time she does not know who we are or where she is. Would better care or new experiences even matter at this point' I believe that for the sake of our humanity better care is necessary. However, for the sake of ourselves, we can not expect medicine and science to save us from the inevitable fate of aging. There is so much it can do for the quality of our lives now, but there is nothing it can do about what is intrinsic to all of us. We will age. We will die. We can only hope to not have regrets and to have enjoyed the time we’ve had. Medicine is not the cure for death. It is a way of making the journey more bearable.