Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Your family gave that dog a second chance at life for a long time. Someone just permanently damaged him before you guys met each other. Even if he never became a friend, you still gave him more moments of comfort and safety than he would have seen had you guys not taken him in. It's sad he couldn't recover, but if giving him up was the end of his story, you still gave him all you could before that.
Working in animal rescue, I think a lot about animals that can't be saved, and sometimes a calm and peaceful end isn't the worst outcome. You probably know all this, as your story makes you seem very compassionate, but just in case, you shouldn't feel guilty. You guys went above and beyond what most would have done for that poor dog. ❤️
It happens to people sometimes too. I've had a lot of patients actually that are completely incapable of safely accepting help from another human. You'll be just trying to get their own excrement off them before it gives them chemical burns and they'll scream and claw at you the whole time then get covered in bodily fluids again within a few hours.
Less soul-crushing but in some ways more frustrating is addicts who are just never going to be ready to be sober within the bounds of support that are available and keep using the mental health system in ways it's not designed for then yell at everyone throughout the entire process when they're not getting what they want at that exact moment whether it's more substances or more food or just to yell at someone because their life is legitimately awful and they don't know how to cope with that in any other way than trying to make sure everyone else is miserable too.
A little over a year ago we got news that a patient that hadn't come back for a while had managed to complete suicide this time around and I was just relieved to know their pain had finally ended. Clearly we weren't helping so they did what they had to to find peace. When I talk to most people about stuff like this they just have 0 perspective like. Most of my interactions with this person were them demanding more Graham crackers at 2am then yelling at me if we were out. That was like. The main thing they were living for. The Graham crackers. They weren't even capable of holding a conversation of any kind about things they liked to do, or even music they liked or anything. If you tried they'd yell at you. TF were they gonna get sober for they didn't even have anything to live for...? They were literally just a shell of a human being and the only thing left inside was anger.
Those are good examples. I've never known serious addicts, but seeing how my grammom dealt with grandpa getting Alzheimer's was very difficult, as they'd been married 70 years, so it's not even like she could remember life without him, and then he was physically there, but mentally lost 99% of the time. She was relieved after he was finally at piece, but by then, so much of her felt taken away from her, she basically decided she wanted to not be here if he wasn't and she essentially said her goodbyes to us and said she was going to stop her meds so she could be with him again. She was my fav relative, and was one of the few loving people I had growing up. But I knew for years she was miserable watching pop suffer and be lost and afraid. I told her she didn't owe anyone anything and if she wasn't old enough to make her own decisions, who the heck was? I miss her every day, but I think she was right to feel relief when pop was at peace, and it was right for her to decide she didn't want to be in a world with half of herself missing.
My lifelong best friend just went through the same thing with his mother and a long bout of dementia. It was so physically and mentally demanding on him, his mom seemed very lost and upset almost all the time, and his dad was having all kinds of mental challenges coping with the situation and taking it out on my friend and the caregiver they hired, and as sad as it was to lose her eventually, everyone living's life was in many ways, much calmer and stable and they were able to start healing. I miss her too, as I knew her since I was around 6, so almost 40 years. But much of her was lost to illness and was never coming back.
We also lost both my wife's parents withing the last few years, and I was horrified at how terrible it is to be there while actively losing someone. I was at the hospital with my wife for both of them, and they both were essentially past the point of no return, but we all were there 12+ hours waiting for the physical process to be over. It seemed very demeaning to the person that was dying, and very cruel to the family to just have to sit there and wait for everything to stop instead of giving a loved one the peaceful and graceful end that we give to animals. I think I was more angry than sad, and I felt closer to them than to my own parents. It just seemed needlessly prolonged for all parties involved, and the family is getting mad at the poor nurses, because their hands are tied, so I felt bad for them too. Like, if there is no way they are going to recover, where is the humanity in making everyone sit there and watch that final suffering? It was just baffling to me how we can say that is cruel to let an animal linger like that, but we make families do that every day.
I tried not to go on so off topic for so long, but I get frustrated so many people refuse to talk about death until it's right in front of their face. Some people act like I'm morbid or something, but it is an inevitability, and I think being mentally prepared for it is helpful because you won't be in the right state of mind to think through anything when you're on the spot facing it. It also leads to not having wills, insurance, and plans for many important things the surviving parties will need to deal with that also delays people healing from the experience.
Thanks. That perspective helps.