article_snippet.sent: As a physician, a physician has seen patients die in hospitals, hooked to morphine drips and overcome with anxiety.
article_snippet.sent: a physician has watched dying drag on for weeks or months as terrified relatives stand by helplessly.
article_snippet.sent: Recently, however, a physician thoughts about how seriously ill people die have become personal.
article_snippet.sent: And if surgeons gets to a point where there's nothing more medicine can do, surgeons wants to be able to control when and how surgeons life ends.
article_snippet.sent: Physicians "have a very deep and broad understanding about what the journey to death can be like," said Tucker, executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center.
article_snippet.sent: It is the physicians' job to take care of the patient and that is amplified when the patient is most sick," said spokeswoman Molly Weedn.
article_snippet.sent: Throughout that career as an internal medicine doctor, a hospice volunteer and now an anesthesiologist, that has become frustrated with how the medical system handles death.
article_snippet.sent: Doctors spend so much time trying to extend life that few focus on what patients want in patients last days, that said.
article_snippet.sent: I don't think a lot of patients have insight into what to expect.