I'm sorry that was your experience. You are correct that all must die. Unfortunately, most don't reckon with that fact until it is too late. Simply offering assisted suicide as an option doesn't solve that problem. It creates a much worse social problem and perverse incentives.
Refusing respiratory therapy or medication is not assisted suicide. Nobody has to die in an ICU or hooked up to tubes if that is not their choice and they prepare properly. And as you note, hospice painkillers given to alleviate suffering also not assisted suicide even if it has a double effect in accelerating inevitable death.
If you want to prepare an alternate plan to blast your brain out on drugs to the point of death that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean we should create a system where we doctors are in the business of deliberately killing their patients on demand (or worse, as it leads to, pushing this "service" on their patients).
I get it that this is the accepted orthodoxy in Hacker News circles.
But I reject your framing.
You already have the option to choose suicide. Go make your arrangements, and then go do it privately. Nothing is stopping you except yourself, and no one can stop you if you don't make your intentions clear to someone willing and able to do so, in which case it is really a "cry for help."
What the pro-euthanasia/"aid in dying" legalization people really demand is not a right to suicide, but a right to social approval of their suicide. This is what they call "dignity," the right to broadcast their intention to kill themselves on their own terms, while anyone else in a position to intervene is forced to helplessly watch them do it.
And to integrate this into the healthcare system, and we've seen how that story plays out in Canada and in Europe. To the point where desperate people are pushed toward suicide and physically healthy, mentally sick children are killed off with state approval.
Refusing respiratory therapy or medication is not assisted suicide. Nobody has to die in an ICU or hooked up to tubes if that is not their choice and they prepare properly. And as you note, hospice painkillers given to alleviate suffering also not assisted suicide even if it has a double effect in accelerating inevitable death.
If you want to prepare an alternate plan to blast your brain out on drugs to the point of death that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean we should create a system where we doctors are in the business of deliberately killing their patients on demand (or worse, as it leads to, pushing this "service" on their patients).