CANADA passes ASISSTED SUICIDE BILL.

taanshi79 ,

I would feel similar were I in your situation. One sentence from Michael sums up the critical things: "Living with no movement is hard, living with no physical sensation is a lot, lot harder. I miss the feeling of touch more than anything and find knowing that I will never have it again very difficult."

My regret is not having discussed loss of sensation more with Michael. I meant to get to it... such a familiar complaint after someone has passed. Our sensations form and inform our relationship with this world. They define "who am I?". I feel the wind on my skin- this is where I am in the world. I feel the water when swimming- life is embracing me in the most sensual possible way. I hear the birds and wind- I "know" the natural world. Those contacts are lost to me.

While I'm fully independent, my experience of human society is mostly limited to the written word because my hearing is almost gone. This makes the natural world one dimensional- I only see it. It is flat. I see the birds fly but cannot hear their calls of joy or anger. Neither skin nor other impaired senses (proprioception! gone!) tell me where I am in space nor what is "with" me. I do not fit into reality- instead I drop things constantly or knock them off counters. I am like a damaged bird who crashes into windows without realizing they are there.

I used to live most of my life outdoors for love of the intense stimulation of wind, temperature, sounds and sights and harder -to-describe information that seeped in through my pours. Nature meant everything to me. Now I am mostly stuck indoors with very little tolerance of temperature changes. My reality is impoverished. It would be what the UN calls "extreme poverty". This minute fraction of stimulation means my brain has been starved for 11 years, getting increasingly stupid as a result. I have difficulty processing speech now, even with amplification. Yet another diagnosis, called Auditory Processing Disorder. Did I mention my vision is failing due to Macular Degeneration?  This is probably due to the years of malnutrition that followed my injury, when my body  just "shut own" and did not absorb much, as happens to a small percentage of SCId people.

So there you are, having all the above 1000 times worse. Sure, it is good to see the glass half full. Yet someone as astute as Michael Bonney acknowledged that his glass was broken and the water had spilled, nothing left but a small puddle. We decide each day if there is something worth being alive for, and we continue, yet we cannot help but be aware of our poverty, of how our experience of life has diminished to an impoverished sliver. Feeling negative is natural and I am glad to see you speak your thoughts, Drew. You acknowledge a side of life most of us feel at least now and then, and in that way you speak for us.

I too, am lucky to have a spouse, even to complain about. I am "lucky" in a zillion ways, but that is not what this thread is about.