Don't tell me how I should die

I remember being out in the Sounds with my father cutting a walking track when he gashed his leg with a chainsaw.

Hearing a few choice words, I ran around the corner to see him sitting on the ground with a chewed up pant leg and blood pouring from the wound.

We were about two hours' hike from home. I started to stress about what I was going to do next, when he wrapped a shirt around his leg and said to me "We'll just finish up to this next ridge and then I think we had better head back". And so we did.

He had a very high pain tolerance, you could say.

READ MORE:
* Of course we should offer euthanasia to those who want it
* Should Kiwis have the right to die with 'dignity'?
* Terminally ill Kiwis to have their say on euthanasia
* Euthanasia and suicide are two very different things

My father died from cancer just before Christmas. When he was near the end, he was in agony.

Yes, they do give pain relief - lots of it if necessary - but it put him in a near-coma. He started to think he was losing his mind (and he had a brilliant one), when he wasn't. The morphine was just messing with it.

Morphine also comes with side effects such as nausea. The anti-nausea medication brings on constipation, and so on and so on.

In the last few days he was paralysed, stuck in bed with no control over his life except the position of his hospital bed.

It was not peaceful like it appears in the movies. It was a struggle, and one he was forced to go through because he was not given the choice to do otherwise.

Putting the story of every individual (including myself) aside, the question of euthanasia seems simple to me. If you are against it, don't do it - but don't tell me, or anyone else, how we should die.

Give me the right not to die with 'dignity', but to avoid suffering any more than I want to.

Don't tell me it is a 'noble' fight, or gives people time to say goodbye. That is selfish - it is not your right to make people suffer for your feelings, beliefs or religion.

Just let people who wish to avoid the suffering have the same rights as those who wish to fight on - the right to make a choice to do so.