It may be time we talked about this

As you may be aware I have Aspergers, or at least that is my preliminary diagnosis. There is a lot written about Aspergers and I am not about to rehash it here. But there is something that is often overlooked.
This is mostly about adults with Aspergers, particularly those who were not diagnosed as children, a situation that often comes with depression as a comorbidity .
Half of us, this grouping, will struggle with suicidal thoughts.
Nearly a third will attempt suicide.
A third.
That is ten times the rate in Neurotypical adults. To put it in perspective that is the same kill rate as the Black Death.
Why?
You cannot come up with a single answer that fits everyone. But I suspect it is the normal Aspie tension. We cannot tolerate social interaction but we are desperately lonely. It's like being a drug addict allergic to drugs.
I have no answer as to what to do. I have had a week where my PSW and I parted company as we both agreed he could not help me, and my psychiatrist said much the same. I just have to live with it, apparently. It is up to others to adjust to me, apparently.
Yep. That works.

Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods

Today has been rough.  I did manage to do some work on a chapter this morning but that used up everything I had.  Couldn't even go to the gym.  The afternoon was dedicated to sleep.
I have a nasty sore throat going on and a lot of joint pain.  I don't know if this is coincidental or flu.  thing with EDS is that it feels like you have flu most days even when you don't.
My mood is...troubling.  My old twin brain system is working well I suppose.  Spock is running things.  Did a lot of child wrangling over the weekend.  Even had a grown up night out on Saturday.
But to say my heart is not in it is an understatement.  My mood underneath is blackest midnight.  I am a zombie, carrying on the motions wearing the meat of a living person.  My hands make capering motions.  That is all.
Mrsinky was away, at a concert, with company all weekend.
I couldn't cope.
Now she is back and needs my help.  And I give it.  Because part of me thinks if I just help her hard enough she will come back and I can live again.

It comes so slow and it leaves so fast

Well as ever Joan Armatrading had a song for it.

Today helped foal with homework and had her sob over how no one gets her and she cant talk to people.

Went to gym.

Crashed. Mrsinky said she hated to see me so emotional.

Well I just hate to see me.

I was up v late after Ashes place. Huge comedown. Much self revulsion. 4 am with a good deal of gin inside me I slept.

Today was too hard. I can't do this. I can't bear to be alone. I do not know how to communicate with people irl. I think its time for me to give up.

I did alone for many years. Then mrsinky happened and I had a hope of lasting company. Well such things do not happen twice. Statistics can only be stretched so far.

Cost benefit analysis not rosy.

In How to Murder Your Wife Jack Lemmon offers the jury a button to make their wife disappear. If I had a surefire button of painless death right now I would press it so hard my thumb would break.

Is it so much to ask fo, some kind of happiness? What did I do that was so wrong?

What could I do more yeah I'm really not sure I know I'm running circles but I can't quit...

Ha, find that reference without googling or clicking...

It used to be a backing track on a Tony Hawks game.  Oddly I do have a slight taste for skaterpunk.

It has been a weekend in a hell of my own making.  Well there is the first lie right there, I didnt make it all but what the hey.

It is difficult to encapsulate my feelings on this one. But I am going to try.

Roll back to Friday evening when, if you recall, Ash took me out as an act of kindness to cheer me up.  I think I did ok in Human Emulation most of the way through, but on the way back home I  started with the verbal spew which is characteristic of nervousness on my part.  Kept rabbitting on about the weirder things I have done in the name of science (making transparent noses for example), and even though I could hear myself and was thinking "Shut up Inky" I couldnt do it.  poor Ash must have had a shit journey.
So then Friday night I was properly alone, MrsInky being away and foal at the Hutts place. Cue massive loneliness and depression.  Guilt.  Worthlessness. I watched telly, then porn, then more telly.  Finally got some sleep due to Mirtazapines caress.
So then Saturday was an early start after little sleep.  I was in withdrawn mode, not so much from the pills as from severe depression.  If you havent experienced this for yourself the closest is the Pink Floyd song Comfortably Numb.  I could respond to people but only with a time lag, and distractedly.
I had to take Foal to Band Camp ( local school music workshop) so picking her up from the Hutt had been what got me through the night.  I drove her there, she was anxious because her friend was going for the first time and she wanted to help him find things.  Foal is very caring for others.
So as I say I sit there surrounded by all these fecund people with their happy families and their perfect lives and I can feel myself getting more and more tense and sad and sad an tense and tense and ARAAARRRRRG.  Last time i felt like that was the day I lost my job and then had to go for an ultrasound.  I asked for a seat in a cubicle because madperson.  at Band Camp I just had to hang on with my fingernails.  The urge to violently self harm was so strong.
I got through it.  But the rest f Saturday was a write off.
Yesterday was not much better.  Foal and I did the normal stuff then went 10 pin bowling.  she is rather good and beat me first time.  second game  think she let me win. I put my hip out doing this though.
Then MrsInky came home.  She had been given shit by the Hutt and was crying.  I wanted so much to hold her and make it better.  But I am not allowed to do that any more.  The things she reported about what made her mother cross...I cannot process.  It seems the image they have of me is so warped and horrible...If I really seem that way to others then that is it, I am out of here.  Maybe they judge me by how they behave?
Anyway MrsInky being back meant I wasnt in charge any more.  Major danger.  I just sat there and cried.  So hard to believe that the woman I turned to for comfort for a decade doesnt want me any more.  So tough trying to be strong and amicable but just hurting hurting hurting all the time, my soul bleeding to death while we stand around and watch and be polite.
I was meant to be going to the gym, but this meant crossing the Orwell Bridge and that scared me.  Eventually I went.

A close run thing.
This pit I am in....I really cannot see a way out.

Safe in my own words, learning from my own words Cruel joke,

Reason notwithstanding, the universe continues unabated.

I am running out of bottom.  Actually I have a bottom the size of Brazil but I mean emotionally and lifewise.

Avid readers will remember that my wife of 11 years asked for a divorce.  That was on a Saturday IIRC.  I spent a few days pleading, and then another mourning.  And then I thought "pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again"  so I rang my boss to find out about a back to work plan.

Things at work had been strained for a very long time.  He has no idea of how much shit I tidy up for him without him having to deal.  Much of that shit is generated by his lack of organisation.  And this is me saying it.  All he sees is me not there at 9 am. I have a medical note for flexitime and I also always put in more hours than on the contract. The 9am thing matters to him because he wants to be able to pop in first thing and dump surprise work on people.  For me that is very disruptive.

Anyway the upshot of the phonecall was stay off sick because you will not have a job to come back to.

So, no wife, no job.

Still living in the same house as wife, and generally things are amicable.  But I am dying inside.  Last night she was upset with me for reasons I didn't really understand (remember I don't do social cues so I may be in the wrong and not know it.) She has made it plain that a marriage is not going to work, not in the normal sense. I am not going into details but what she said has made me hate me so much.

Before xmas I had a job, a wife, we were trying for a baby.

Now I have...a tattoo. This process is like someone taking a knife and cutting away everything I valued or self identified as and making me loathe what remains and the mess the process makes. Every night I pray I will not wake up, that I can just die in my sleep. That undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns would be most welcome.

I go through the motions.  I sent out a cv.  I am thinking of getting a dog.  In my idle moments I think of getting  a bivvi tent and some second hand kit and just walking somewhere.  anywhere.

A lifetime ago I did intensive group therapy at a place called the Red House.  I then finished my PhD, got a variety of jobs, found a girl, settled down, I wanted to so I married, and I thought I was going to grow old and be happy.  But it turns out that who I was was incompatible with that.  So 20 years later I find myself in the same place, suicidal, alone, hurting, no job, no partner, no soul-mate, pretty soon no family.  the last time this happened I was still fairly young. Rebuilding a life from nothing didn't seem such a fools errand.  This time I feel like life has just finished with me.  I cannot go through all that again.  Back then I had friends.  My marriage got rid of all of them, they are strangers to me now, with lives of their own.  Here I have mrsinkys friends. And I cannot ask them to choose.  It is clear when I talk to them she feels hurt so I shall stop doing that soon.

I can either accept the mixed metaphor and do a caligula against the sea of troubles, or oppose.

The psychiatrist has me on daily visits to make sure I am still breathing.

In other news last night I fainted in the bathroom.  This follows a day of joint hell and a serious sublux in the swimming pool.

How many more hints do I need?

Whats..Uh, the deal?

So this morning a miracle happened.  My G.P. , in common with many of his colleagues, has many ways of getting an appointment in a month but only one way of getting an appointment on the day- the 8.30 phone lottery.
This is cunningly timed to coincide with the school run.  Normally you spend 20 minutes on redial then get told there is none left.
Today I had my hands free on and told foal to dial.  We got through first time. Yay team Inky.
The GP was his normal harried self.  40 minutes overrun by 9.40 the poor bastard.  He listened.  He even had some follow up questions on things he had actually listened to on the last visit.
He referred me to the CMHT.
OK so thats how its supposed to go I think.  But it is easy to see how pitifully little that is.
At the moment my life is coming apart at the seams.  I either have lost or am losing everything that matters to me.  I have literally nothing left that I can count on.  What I have is melting like a chocolate butt plug.
I am sick of people thinking that they know what is good for me and deciding it for me.  That is not a comment on the readership here- you have been right about me needing to get help.  My reluctance is due to my firm belief that help is not really possible.  Help for this kind of thing is dependent on the idea that people change, and that the relationship between patient and therapist is built on trust and honesty.  Well to quote a character that was based on me, people do not change, and everybody lies.
But in other areas of my life people decide based on their own views what is good for me, or what would help me.  They never ever get it right.  And the actions they take based on those assumptions are killing me.
After the GP, and th curry cake, it was a sofa day.
And now it is an anxiety evening.  Foal is abed.  Mrsinky out at a work do.  I am restless.  Typing this is all I can do.  My stomach is turning over and over.  My joints ache.  I cant concentrate even on Buffy.
I dont know how much more of this I can take.

There was some good news for mrsinky today.  perhaps she can be happy.

Canst thou draw leviathan with a hook?

I know my brain is not working. Today was trialling another of Elizas recipes...this time for Acton Gingerbread. I added the wrong spice. Fark knows what it will taste like.
I got to the gp today and have a referral to cmht.
I await the quackery with bated breath.

Update...recipe v good. Not so good with cumin in it. Curry cake. Acquired taste.

Doing Badley

The village of Badley no longer exists.

I hasten to add this is not my fault. I didnt do it. No one seems sure what did.

But today i did a stroll up the walk to Badley hall or the half that remains. Pics below.
That was about a mile on the flat.
My legs are in hell mode.
Im not sure why I finally went there. I have driven past it many times.
I was trying to clear my head. It didnt work.
I feel I am doing everything  for the last time. My heart is broken.

Midnight on the firing line

It is difficult to explain today.

Essentially I spent the day on the sofa. I know that sounds luxurious and I suppose it is. But I am in shutdown.

My joints are bad. I foolishly tried to show foal how to stand on a skateboard. I fell off of course because of my eds even as a child I could never balance. I rolled properly but the shock destabilised my left hip and shoulder. It could be worse. For a zebra I am very lightly afflicted.

My depression is not lifting. It just changes. Today after no sleep and a row with mrsinky all i could do was slump.

I keep not calling the gp because it will get better.

Im not sure thats true.

Macarons

Operation makemrsinkylovemeviafood continues apace.
She is out late at work. Again.
My head has Mr Brightside on looptape whenever I stop.
So I made pistachio macarons with homemade plum jam and chantilly filling.
Ok now ive stopped.

....Im Mr Brightside

Porridge wars and droopy drawers

I am aware that at least one noble avian over on Bad Science has declared war on bad porridge.
Around here due to morning rush I have been guilty of using Oat So Simple sachets as a lazyporridge.
This inevitably means that we have loadsasachets gathering dust. Various flavours.
I am loathe to throw them away because starving wild slime moulds etc...so what to do?
COOOOOKKIIIIEEEES!!!!!
So I thought oat and raisin cookies.
So here goes...
3oz butter
3oz castr sugar
Big old dollop honey
1 egg
1tsp cinnamon
3 oz SR flour
2 sachets Oat So Simple. Pick a flavour.
4 oz raisins

Cream butter and sugar and honey. Add egg and cinnamon. Mix to a soft slop.
Add in all other ingredients. Stir.
Spoon onto tray but  leave room as they spread. Cook 185c 15 mins till browned.

How do they taste? Pretty good. The flavouring from the sachet does come through though so be warned.

Now on to part two. File the above under displacement activity.
Today has been good. Suicide monkey is frightened of foal. Its been quiet. Of course Mrsinky is now back so monkey is ooking in the background.
But as i  said in earlier posts body has not been good. A LOT of pain in wrists shoulders and feet.
My asthma is crazy. 3 attacks today. Im maxed on preventer and the ventolin has given me the shakes. The back neighbours have a bonfire going. This is not good.
But the worst news is myasthenia. This is new for me. It may be real or percieved. But a few times my legs have folded rising ftom a chair. I have been dizzy and weak and pre syncopic.
I know this is something that Bitey and others from the flange have all the time. But for me given all I did today was do  a stroll to some mounds with Nick (who was great but sexagenarian at least) setting the pace.
My golden holiday when a PhD student was hiking in the alps doing 40k per day. I suppose somehow I have always thought I might do it again.

Or not.

The beauty of those alpine meadows was breathtaking. I suppose those flowers will have to bloom in my memory.

The more I go on with this yhe more I feel my life is closing down. I am losing my self piece by piece. Dying by inches.
Fuck this shit.

Night thoughts

I am in a state. Gratuitous Simkn and Garfunkel....

I can hear the resonant warthog like snoring of the girl that I love
As she lies here beside me and farts in her sleep
And her arse in the moonlight glows like a conch shell
Cos shes twisted the covers down under her feet....

But I digress.
Suicide monkey is strong tonight. Ordinarily I would neck gin and tramadol but i have given one of thosd up not without cost. So I am sipping beer in the dark. My gastric surgery means booze hits me hard and fast.
The suicide monkey followed me into the pool at david lloyd today. I was doing some lengths to try and cut down the leukotrienes. Gentle exercise can help asthma a lot.
Stupid monkey was swimming alongside me telling me to inhale water. Sounds silly but its a pain.
Speakjng of pain my no sleep diet has left me very hurty. The hips and shoulders and wrists in particular.
Thumb also hurts.
And vision is deteriorating.
Monkey may have a point.

Oddly one can have too much of a bad thing

I think it is fair to say that I am at something of a low ebb. Mind you its not being made better by Starbucks literally this second playing "At Seventeen". I think they are trying to finish me off.
Last night Mrsinky was back late. This was not good for a number of reasons.

I had a day where I was forced to speak to The Hutt with whom I am arguing. I also had Boss emailing me 5 times for documents on a research contract. The ones that I had emailed to him in July. I got them by searching through sent items. I also had a somewhat stormy parent consultation visit at Foals school...more about which I may post later. And I had to cope with a visit from my dad who cannot ever just let things lie. I also had a massive project peer review to do and a contract research piece.
That's bosses idea of off sick.
On top of this I hot my first asthma attack in a year. A bad one. An on the floor wanting to die one.
People think asthma is wheezing. In fact the inflammation and airway tightening is accompanied by muchs formation. My asthma attacks are coughing fits.
Imagine you cough. Then cough again. And again.  Every time you vreathe in you cough. Your diaphragm hurts. A pressure builds in your head. All you can do is cough and suck decreasing volumes of air. Then cough. Then vomit because the coughing triggers a gag. Then cough.
Ventolin helps. But you have to breathe it in...
Well I am up to 3 attacks now in 24 hrs. I came into town today and forgot the inhaler. Luckily my time teaching pharmacists let me know the regs enough to get one from boots before it got too bad but i nearly had one here.
You can blame the cold I am just getting over, which often gives me twitchy lungs or stress. Whichever.
So last night I fell asleep waiting for mrsinky to get back. Woke crying around 2.30
Woke crying at 4.30
Woke crying at 5.30
Stayed awake crying watching 2012.
Then did the school run
Now hiding in Starbucks from the Suicide Monkey, his friend the despair squid and the asthma penguin.
And i cant straighten up or lift my arm above shoulder height.
You know it sounds odd, but there may cone a time when I get tired of yhis.

Hiding in plain sight

I am generating quite a bill at Costa.

In the mornings at the moment I get Foal ready for school then drop her off.  Apart from arguments as to wether I am allowed to play my guitar while she gets ready thats fine.  Normal flow of family life.  I guess I ought to store that whilst I have a family.

But then I have to be on my own.

I cannot do that.  I go to Costa, or the gym, or Tesco.  anywhere where I can't be jumped by the suicide monkey.  The suicide monkey is scared of Lattes you know.

I am trapped.  I cling to appointments as the next thing that stops me.  Cat kill self before haircut.  Cant kill self before parents evening.

After mrsinky gets home it gets worse.  Because then she is on duty not me and again the monkey lurks in the kitchen with the knives.

The monkey wakes me at 4.30 am.  The monkey rides in the car with me, so I avoid the main roads where he wants me to go faster. The monkey waits in the bathroom with the toilet cleaner.  The monkey lives in the tie rack in my cupboard.  He is a very inventive monkey.

The monkey only has to be lucky once.

De Profundis

I am alone in my car. I am parked with the engine running in a disabled space behind m and s.
I had to park because I had nowhere to go.
I chose to drive into town because it was less dangerous. The main roads all it takes is a twitch of the wheel and welcome death opens his arms.
Here its impossible to guarantee death and more disability is offputting enough.
I do not have a hosepipe for the exhaust. Ive seen co poisoning. No thanks.
I suppose pickiness in method is all I have left between me and death. That may be enough.
From tonights viewpoint I have lost my wife and daughter to an abusive bitter woman. I am done. Through. You win.
I loved you both
Remember that.

KJV

My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.

5 Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.

6 And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for thenwould I fly away, and be at rest.

7 Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness. Selah.

8 I would hasten my escape from the windy stormand tempest.

I may be part dalek

I made a classic mistake a week or two ago. I walked down a corridor.
Now I know what you are thinking...reckless fool how can he be let out alone? Needless to say the corridor exacted it's righteous vengeance by causing my right leg, previously known as Mr. Good Leg, to not work.  For those of you with the good fortune never to have experienced a sublux just imagine that your leg suddenly has no strength in it. You topple over..grab the wall...swear...
Of course then the trouble starts. The sublux may or may not reduce on its own(this one i think has not) but it will have caused damage to the tissue around the joint. So your hip stops being a hip and becomes a toothache.
This means any walk beyond about 50m is impossibly painfull. So Davros the wheelchair comes back out.
For anyone who has not spent time in a wheelchair I urge you to do it one day. Round a town centre. Normal day. Not only does it make everything soooo much harder it also gives people a licence to treat you like a vegetable, patronise you rigid or indeed just deny you service. Places such as David Lloyd Ipswich, about whom I shall be blogging anon. There is no experience like it for making you feel like crap.
Now of course Mr Hip being out of whack makes Mr Knee hurt which makes Captain Back hurt etc etc. In fact hip pain doesnt always feel like hip pain. To me it often feels like someone is squeezing my testicle.
So then theres one whole side of your body you can't sleep on. And that means the other side gets slept on too much. And hurts.
There has been a good deal of Davros recently and no end in sight. Dalekery abounds.
As I mentioned tother day I am a bit depressed. On Wednesday for one reason or another I was alone. I spent it on the sofa. All I could do was think of lots of ways of killing myself. Knives. Electricity. Chemicals. Crashing the car. Hanging. I could work out ways of doing it neatly. Ways to contain the perimortem incontinence. Methods to ensure wife or child did not find me because they dont need that.
But oddly not one method worked on a sofa.
So I stayed there.
So the evidence...I get around on wheels. I struggle with stairs. And sofas offer protection from my weaponry.
I am becoming a Dalek.

I'm your only friend; I'm not your only friend, but I'm a little glowing friend, but really I'm not actually your friend

There are a multitude of things wrong with me.
Well any poor soul who has read my rantings so far will have tumbled to that, but for once I am not going to lead off with my physical woes here.  I mean mentally.
I don't have an ongoing diagnosis other than occasional Major Depression for a simple reason:  several times I have been assessed by psychologists as part of induction to some treatment or other on the NHS (where if you want your ingrowing toenail removed they do a psych evaluation to make sure you won't miss it) and they tended to all come back with very similar tentative diagnoses. My doctor and I looked up the treatments available for them ( none) and decided that a label wasn't necessary or desirable.
But if you want a ballpark area then if you have schizoid personality disorder in mind then you probably aren't far away from the truth. I don't socialise.  I mean I really don't. The last social event I went to without being forced to by my wife or work was probably my wedding ten years ago.  And even then you could say there was a certain coercion involved.
People trigger a threat response in me.  I can't close my eyes with people around.  I don't like going to spaces where people are.  I prefer very formal, codified situations ( lectures for example are ok- its got rules).  Put me in a box with people and you have about 2 hrs before I will go nuts just to escape.
My first thought when entering a party is always the same ..."when can i leave?"
All of which would be fine if I was happy with this.  But I am not.  I'm fucking miserable.  And lonely.
Add all that to the EDS, a childhood of peer abuse and bullying and its a lovely mix.  One of the reasons i react so badly to the idea of there being a God is that I wouldn't want to see what I would do to the fucker if I met him.
Until recently I had a social outlet I could cope with.  It was an online forum which i joined almost by accident about 5 years ago and slowly came to spend a lot of time in.  The people there were not real people you see, they lived in the pixels of the PC screen. They were safe.
Over time, the board, which had been very confrontational in a right-on sixth form activist kind of way came to be a more caring place, with several threads devoted to caring for others and offering support.  As this coincided with my disabilities worsening you can imagine that this was very welcome.
The problem is it was not welcome to everyone.  A number of the sixth form activists really rather resented this.  Every time a fight erupted on the board they would suggest that getting rid of the support threads would be task 1 for a cleanup.  Their conception of the board was very different from mine or others.  I honestly could not tell you who was right.
Well you can probably see where this is going? One of the sixth formers and I got into a tussle.  He regarded himself as having a direct and forthright manner in debate.  I thought he was needlessly cruel, callous and obscene in his turn of phrase and quite vicious about it too.  I had said so many times in the past, gently at first.  Well recently there was a tussle, the normal suggestion was made and I objected to it.  This morphed rapidly into a situation where it felt like every time I posted on any thread the sixth former was there shouting abuse at me.
The discussion was long and tedious.  From my perspective he was unable to admit that he could possibly be wrong in any way.  His behaviour towards me I regard as simple bullying.  And I should Know.  It was the same attitude I got from my abusers.
After the first block of this I was crying and shaking in my office.  I had to lock the door so no-one could see me.  The moderators asked for a break for reflection.  He started again on another thread. I ended up self harming.  That night I overdosed on pills and alcohol.  I don't know if it was deliberate or not.  Could be either.
I went back to the board the next morning to find he had started up again.  And the people that I had cared about...well i m not sure what i wanted.  some kind of reaction.  But really, nothing happened.  Ripples in a pond. So i said goodbye.
The thing is that what i was saying goodbye to was people.  It turns out that people are never safe.  It was an illusion.  I suppose I should thank him for finally making me face the truth.  I may want to open up to people and interact with them, but it is a horrifically dangerous thing to do.  In truth it only leads to pain.
At least confiding in this blog is a mite safer.  I am the only person who ever reads it.

What have you got to be miserable about?

In some ways it is impossible to talk about an illness without indulging in what has been called, with some reason, disability top trumps.  How can one compare one disability with another after all?  Or one illness with another?  After all there was a huge fuss recently when, with the best intentions, a charity tried to compare one cancer to another.
To be honest its probably not worthwhile to even start.  After all what matters is that someone is in distress, not a sad, sick game of "Who's the gimpiest? ".  But we humans, or rather you humans and us horses, with our pack structures and our narrative imaginations seem, to need to rank everything.
On that basis my personal disability probably wouldn't make it into the top 100.  Don't get me wrong, i recently characterised it as:  (pardon the swears)

a pigfucking hyaenabitch arse elephant from hades with a cuntgiraffe chaser

but there are worse varieties even of Ehlers Danlos, and within my own variety I am one of the least afflicted. 
Why am i bothering about ranking systems?  Simply put, death.
I live in a country where euthanasia is technically legal.  But only in certain circumstances, the chief ones being that one has to have a terminal disease or a cancer, to qualify.  Now on one side I can see the point there, as probably those people are top of the list when it comes to suffering....or are they?  Seriously how does one gauge suffering?

I know that this is a touchy subject for many, and brings out a lot of make believe artists, but lets be clear here I am talking specifically about the right to die of people who can ask for it personally.  No coercion, no power of attorney.  I also emphatically do not want to promote the idea of topping oneself.  Its not a romantic statement.  It is a last resort.

But we live in a world where that last resort is effectively closed off to anyone who actually needs it.  I mean all due respect but if a cancer patient wants to kill themselves generally they should just substitute alternative medicine for the chemo and wait a year or two.  Some of us don't get off so lightly.

I do not understand, to be frank, why we do not allow anyone who asks for it a painless death.  Many people in chronic pain kill themselves, or try to.  Frankly they have a point.  Granted many suicides are irrational acts, carried out in the throes of great passion.  But some are rational choices.  Does anyone have the right to deny this exit?  My simple answer to that would be no.  Heck if I were in charge there would be combination drive-in suicide booths and pet food factories on industrial estates worldwide.

I may be a little liberal in my views there but it comes down to this for me...when life becomes an intolerable sentence do we really have the right to deny people parole?