Can I die of constipation?
Unexpectedly, my life is drawing to a rapid and painful close. As a result, I have seen the inside of quite a few Taiwanese hospitals recently and experienced first-hand the wonderful depth of the Taiwanese healthcare system.
I am so grateful, even occasionally embarrassed, by the medical resources that have been lavished on the pursuit of my repair. At every point in my downward, gurgling spiral the doctors and nurses have been generous in giving me their time and knowledge. Thank you is the best I can say, but it seems hardly adequate.
However, my experience has highlighted to me a small shortcoming in the hospital system that, if improved, might have considerable impact on the short-term well-being of the terminally ill.
We all die, but being terminally ill foreshortens the time scale involved and tends to funnel people through specialized hospital wards.
Obviously, but also surprisingly, life as a terminally ill person becomes irreversibly tied to the consumption of powerful painkillers, which make life bearable, and even enjoyable, but sadly for shorter windows of time.
Painkillers, such as opioid analogues, are justly well-known for their marvelous physiological deadening of pain, but less acknowledged is their formidable — nay terrifying — potential for constipation.
Constipation. Is it worth writing about in a newspaper or thinking about?
In my weakened state, where walking can be an exhausting ordeal, I would say yes.
People defecate quite a lot. Everybody defecates, on average about once a day. Frequently this activity is a significant behavioral act that starts or partitions your day. Successful completion frequently requires physical withdrawal to a psychologically safe, familiar space.
Most healthy people would readily acknowledge that travel or stress can easily negatively influence your biological productivity, which carries over to an uncomfortableness that accompanies you through the day.
This image of a room with solitude is not familiar to terminally ill patients in hospital, who, through the swishing veil of hospital curtains, share the rasping and gasping sounds of life of their compatriots struggling onward and their carers giving sounds of compassion and seeking out sounds of normality and distraction. All these people struggle to use the same shower and perpetually wet toilet that adjoin each ward.
The Taiwanese architectural peculiarity of the tiled, windowless, humid shower and toilet positioned under the stairwell has made a seamless transition to the modern hospital, but it is no longer limited to under the stairs.
Unfortunately, although practical in administration and planning, this toilet style is exactly what is not needed by the terminally ill, who dread the uncomfortableness and indignity of relentless constipation before their illness strangles the life out of them.
The inpatient you pass in the corridor dressed in hospital pajamas pushing the IV line stand is probably not heading to the shop or outside for a cigarette, but is in all probability searching for the privacy of a dry, quiet toilet in which to void more than just time.
Consider adding dry, private, quiet toilets to hospitals.
Peter Osborne is a professor in the field of agriscience who is based in Taitung County.
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