If someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness such as a brain tumor, and the doctors tell him that he has no more than a year to live, but there is a procedure, which is very risky, to remove the tumor and heal the patient allowing him to live the rest of his life normally –Â is the patient able to go through with the surgery?
This is a very heavy issue and requires intimate knowledge of the particulars. I will however try and give you some general guidance.
The procedure is permissible so long as it isn’t tantamount to assisted suicide. Assuming that there is at least a decent chance of survival not 1:1,000,000. All medical procedures have risks every time general anesthesia is administered; there is the risk of death, etc. The key is what are the chances of death vs. the chance of survival. In this case there is the added weight of the person is already terminal and this might give the person the opportunity to live much longer.
If this is more than a hypothetical case, may Hashem guide you to make the right decision and may he, the patient, merit a complete and speedy recovery. These are indeed the hardest decisions to make in one’s life. I watched my grandfather pass away slowly from a brain tumor. It was extremely difficult to watch (the radiation and chemo only sped up the tumor growth). The limited time he had left was definitely a blessing to have, yet the quality of life compared to the opportunity of a full recovery would surely have out-weighed those short few weeks.