On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.

She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.

Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.

But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.

Then she cried.

“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.

That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.

  • areyouevenreal
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    7 months ago

    Also COVID started mutating before the vaccines were even approved. YOU don’t understand vaccines or COVID. Not to mention you couldn’t even get a vaccine in time in some countries because of vaccines companies, copyright, and capitalism more broadly.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Because capital got injected like crazy (and improved technology) pharmaceutical companies managed to create a vaccine in record time. Claiming that capitalism caused delays is beyond short sighted.

      Covid, like all life, mutates all the time, though few mutations make it big. Covid did manage to slowly mutatie due to the amount of people getting sick which was mainly caused by idiot politicians (hello Trump!) That didn’t wanted to isolate, or thought that Covid was a scam or something.

      I do understand the basics of vaccines and Covid, because i read medical journals. It doesn’t matter though, because more importantly, I listen to the experts and I don’t read Facebook conspiracy posts or the “lone wolf’s doctors who know better than all experts who says that they want to enslave you!!”

      If everyone had listened to the experts, Covid would have caused a lot less casualties, especially in the US where the orange retard caused so much death and suffering that he might as well get a nice place ect to hitler in hell.

      • areyouevenreal
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        7 months ago

        Because capital got injected like crazy (and improved technology) pharmaceutical companies managed to create a vaccine in record time. Claiming that capitalism caused delays is beyond short sighted.

        I am not talking about the development of the vaccine, I am talking about deploying it worldwide. Some countries couldn’t afford it. Others didn’t have the right infrastructure and personnel to use it even if they could Because of that and some political issues some countries took to making their own including Cuba and Russia.

        I don’t follow conspiracy theorists. I don’t understand why you keep bringing them up.