When World War II began, my father was not accepted for military service because the doctors found a heart condition, angina, I believe. It was something that worried him for the rest of his life. He had a doctor friend that he might have worked with early on, but it was probably mostly just visiting and talking, because they shared similar interests. But he did OK, and I don't ever remember him visiting our family doctor for any reason.

I think that he viewed doctors as something to be avoided. He was an avid reader and read all kinds of books about health, as well as magazines devoted to health, such as Prevention Magazine. He was also a big believer in nutritional supplements and took a variety of them. He would even prepare a shot glass with vitamins for my mother to take each morning.

Despite the angina, he seemed to be in pretty good health. But in 1994, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and was forced to rely upon doctors. After successful surgery, he took one chemo treatment but refused to take more, He was doing alright, but the doctor determined that he could be prone to esophageal cancer due to acid reflux and put him on prescription, and later on over-the-counter Prilosec. That's where his trouble began and led to his death with a little help from our friends at Hospice' of course.

There was no reason for me to make the connection at the time he became ill, but a few years later I saw a commercial from a law firm that said that if you were taking Prilosec and developed kidney problems, to give them a call.

My father had developed and was dying of kidney failure, but it was hospice that directly killed him.

I was with my father and mother when a hospice nurse visited their home and evaluated the situation.

Soon, a hospital bed was delivered and he was put into it and connected to an IV that fed him morphine.

If you are unaware, morphine is a drug that knocks you out and shuts the body down.

I stopped by the following day to see how he was doing. He looked up at me, said "Hi" and went right back to sleep. The following day I got a phone call from my mother to say that he had died. I went on to call Hospice The Kavorkians.

If you are unfamiliar with the name, Jack Kavorkian was a pathologist who advocated physician assisted suicide. He claimed to have helped at least 130 terminal patients commit suicide. In 1999 he was convicted of murder for helping a man with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, commit suicide.

So how is it that what Kavorkian did was a crime, while what Hospice does, is not?

No one explained to my father, nor to any of us, that they were going to put him into a hospital bed so they could feed him morphine through an IV, that it would knock him out and he would soon be dead.

At the time, I did not know what they would do or that they would be putting him on morphine.

So I was completely surprised by how quickly he had died under Hospice "care." He would have been surprised too, but he never woke up. This was in 2004. He was 80 years old.

So now my thinking is that since he was unaware of what was being done, what Hospice did was not assisted suicide, but murder.

That was my first experience with Hospice. The experience with my wife was quite different. Hospice came in to give her palliative care, so it took two years for them to get her but with something more complex than a morphine drip.