Here’s the question: When I am – or you are – terminally ill, who should decide when to call it quits? Right now, it’s mostly hospitals and doctors, with enforcement from the state.
I don’t want hospitals, churches, or the government making decisions for me about what happens to me at the end of my life. If I’m ill with a terminal disease, then the last choice I get to make should be how I leave this world.
Oregon has led the way in providing terminally ill patients with medically supervised options.
Next week, George Eighmy will be in Vermont to talk about how the more than 10 years of patient choice in dying law has worked out there.
For 12 years he was Executive Director of Compassion & Choices of Oregon, providing non-judgmental information on end-of-life options; he retired last fall.
Vermont’s Patient Choices at End of Life invites all who’d like to hear about Oregon’s experience with Death with Dignity to join them at an event with George. Bring your questions and your friends and family. Copies of Vermont’s proposed Death with Dignity bill (H.274) will be available. All events are free and open to the public.
The first public discussion is Wednesday, March 2nd from 6:30 – 8 pm at the St. Albans Historical Museum, 9 Church St. 3rd fl (enter through rear of bldg. – elevator available).
The rest of the schedule is below:
Thursday, March 3rd
12:30 pm – 2 pm
Middlebury Town Hall Theatre
68 South Pleasant (Merchant’s Row – on the Green)
6:30 pm – 8 pm
Mark Skinner Library in Manchester Center
48 West Rd, just off 7A
Friday, March 4th
6:30 pm – 8 pm
Hardwick Memorial Building, 3rd Fl., 20 Church St.
elevator available at Police Dept entrance. Others enter through main door and go up the stairs.
On the Radio:
MARK JOHNSON SHOW
WDEV
Thursday, March 3rd
9:00 am – 11 am (not sure what time George will be on)
If you want to read the bill or a detailed outline of H.274, you can find both here.
I have seen how hospitals dealt with both of my parents and my mother-in-law and father-in-law: invaded by tubes, pumps, ventilators, beeping monitors, their eyes asking for release whenever they were awake. They all had Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders in their charts. It made no difference.
My father-in-law’s only option for controlling the end of his life was to starve and eventually dehydrate himself to death.
At the end of their lives, both my mother and my mother-in-law found themselves in hospitals with the whole array of medical and mechanical interventions preventing them from dying long after they said they were ready. My 61-year-old mother declared she was ready to die after her third or fourth round of ineffective chemo. The hospital instituted an intrusive ‘suicide watch,’ further destroying any possibility of choice or dignity at the close of her life.
Over a decade ago the woman who was a second mother to me chose to die at home. On a day when she could swallow, she asked for help to consume an overdose of pain medication. One (non-medical) person accepted the legal risk of holding a glass of water and opening the prescription container for her. Everyone close to this woman heaved a sigh of relief when the family doctor later certified the death without question.
Why is it that hospitals get to decide how they can wring out the last dollar from a dying patient regardless of the pain and intrusion they cause or the lack of expected positive result? Why is it that the patient cannot decide how they wish to die, and get expert advice and care from a medical professional on how to accomplish that final request?
The Death with Dignity bill (H.274) being considered in the legislature has so many safeguards against misuse that it may well encourage a dying patient to give up on the process: as currently drafted the bill requires that the patient must be terminal (six months or less to live), request a life-ending medication verbally on two separate occasions, and make a third request in writing before two non-family, non-caregiver witnesses, and all of this AFTER getting a second medical opinion and discussing comfort care and hospice care and pain control. There’s also a two-week delay built into the process.
Oregon’s 10 years of experience with patient choices in dying show that for some patients, just knowing they have the choice and control the means of their dying is enough, and they never actually use it.
Death with Dignity provides an option, not a requirement. It’s the last choice you’ll get to make – if the bill passes. If you want more control over the last days of your life – you should tell your Representatives and Senators you support this bill, and they should, too.
At least go hear George Eighmy. He’s lived with the process for 10 years.
This is an important piece of legislation that needs to be explained and discussed at the local level in order to dispel many of the mistruths that have been circulated about it.
Through endless tests, biopsies, stitching on (as in sewing them onto her body, to keep them from accidentally being pulled out) of IV catheters, and what felt like ceaseless indignities, my father immediately wrote out a medical directive and binding power of attorney. Unfortunately, he has to re-sign all those documents once every six months for the hospitals in his home state to honor them.
Mom died before they figured out which cancer she had, but after her death we learned that they knew early on that she was terminal and would die within days. Her systems were shutting down rapidly, and it was clear that she had some form of advanced cancer – they just didn’t know which one, yet. Due to rules that apply to the otherwise healthy, she was forced to be, essentially, a human guinea pig for the surgical and pathology teams. And we were powerless to prevent any of it.
I know the medical personnel who cared for her were doing what they were required to do according to protocol and the law, but in the case of a near-term terminal patient, it was a sadistic joke.
It should not be so difficult for a terminally ill person to avoid the torture (and I do not use that word lightly) of incessant invasive medical “treatment” at the end of life. A person facing death should be allowed to choose which path to take: “spare no effort” or “leave me be.”
I will definitely be calling my legislators in support of this bill.
Thanks for posting about it.
There’s an apparently well-funded group, Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare, running anti-choice tv commercials. Saw two last night, both featuring the same austere-looking woman. The tag line was absolutely typical of the folks who are anti choice on the other end: “We don’t want this for our Vermont neighbors.”
Translation: We don’t like it, so therefore, you can’t have the choice.
There was another line about how immoral it would be to allow a (terminal) patient to take a drug to end their life, when doctors should be intervening to make the patient live as long as possible and die a ‘natural’ death.
Right. Make the end-of-life patient live regardless of their own choice. Where are the ethics in that?
The crux here is that it would be a choice. If you would rather go the full medical intervention route, that would be your choice. If you don’t, likewise. If you don’t want the option, don’t take it!.
NanuqFC
In a Time of Universal Deceit, TELLING the TRUTH Is a Revolutionary Act. ~ George Orwell