To try to balance how much medication someone gets when they are dying, it is a real art for the doctors and the hospital staff. But as a meditator I would like to keep my mind as clear as possible, that means I am going to have to work with a high pain threshold, because when you take too much morphine and other types of drugs, of course you dull the mind, you are going to lose that ability. This is one of the reasons why we teach about "Unpleasant Physical Sensations" as in last night's talk, so you get ready for pain. Get ready for it, work with it, don't give in to every little physical pain you have.
My father had a tremendous amount of physical pain in his last years, he had scoliosis of the body, which means that the spine virtually went like that. It was all bent over. He had arthritis all over the body, not just his hands or feet, it was everywhere. His shoulder was bone on bone, if he rotated his shoulder, you could hear the rubbing of two bones. He had a heck of a lot of physical pain. He wore what they call a "patch". I have no idea what medication, whether it was morphine or something else, but he wore a patch on his back, which is a very neat invention these days. It is really incredible and it would give a bit of pain relief medication into the skin regularly. It went for three days, and then you take it off and put on another one. Incredible. It would reduce his pain and he didn't seem to lose his mind too much in that way. So balance can be helpful for a lot of people so they keep their mental abilities but still try to lessen the physical pain that they have. However, the more you yourself can deal with physical pain, then of course the less medication you are going to need and then there is less chance of your mind getting confused when you are dying. So keep working on it.