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Notes -
To be more accurate, a lot of patients talked about wanting to die, some asked me at some point if I could help out (I'm not sure how serious those requests were) and one lady pleaded with me to kill her every time I was there, which was almost every day. 1/5 was an approximation on my part. I was regularly asked by patients to "help them die", but I wasn't really regularly asked by the same person except by the one patient. Some other people phrased things like that "it would have been good if I was allowed to help them die", which isn't really asking but is kind of in the same neighborhood.
Most of these people could probably have killed themselves if they had really wanted to, and for all I know some might have. They could have overdosed on the medications they already had in their homes. Perhaps this was too complex and scary for them though, I don't know. I imagine people want a solution that is painless and guaranteed to work, possibly under the supervision of a medical professional, not something where they can fail and die alone painfully over a longer period of time.
These things dont necessarily correlate with how poorly someone is either. My grandfather for instance who died last year at 100 desperately wanted to live even at the end when he was in horrific pain, had terrifying hallucinations and had not been able to move from his bed for months. The last thing he said to my mother was to ask her when he was going to get better again.
His wife (my grandmother), who died 40 years prior from ALS, wanted to be killed and started refusing food etc almost as soon as she became hospital bound in order to speed things up.
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