A Cautionary Tale - The Right to Die

Here's something to think about.

A few days ago I experienced, first-hand, the death of a dear friend.  He had been in decline for several months.   This necessitated a few stays in hospital.

While in hospital my friend had signed a "DNR" or Do Not Resuscitate authorization.  It was his wish that, should he succumb, he not be brought back to life.   The hospital duly kept his directive in his file.

What my friend did not foresee, what no one else foresaw, was what would happen if he succumbed anywhere other than in that particular hospital.

His wife knew of his wishes.  I was fully aware of his wishes.  Yet when the ambulance crews arrived at his home they demanded to see the authorization and, in it's absence, they proceeded to put my (by then safely departed) friend's body through the regime of CPR, defibrilation and, finally, adrenalin injection.

In my friend's case it really didn't much matter.   They were merely working out on a corpse.  But, since then, I've thought of what it might have meant had circumstances been different and had they managed to bring him back.

They would have restored him to a state of abject misery, probably worse than he had endured previously.   For the want of a paper - right here, right now - his fate would have been sealed, his humane choice denied.

How many of us are in this same precarious state?  I know I am.  Yes I have executed my own living will and DNR authorization but how would I ever get that into the hands of the paramedics?

This is not an abstraction to me.  I have already checked out once, possibly twice, only to wake up a day or two later in hospital, my body wracked with terrible pain.   Here's a hint.  If you die in the process of a seizure your body beats the shit out of itself.  You wake up feeling as though you've been in a gang fight you cannot recall.

I was furious the last time it happened, the time I know for certain I was snatched back from the dead.   For I realized that I had crossed the finish line only to have been disqualified by medical intervention.   How does the state have the right to deny anyone a natural death?

The doctors confirmed I was gone.   No pulse, no respiration, my body finally at rest.  I was crossing the Styx.

Now I must die again.   Given the odds, it will be a more protracted ordeal next time.  There will likely be little dignity to it either.

So what is the answer?  I believe I have one.  I believe every province should be required to maintain a DNR, Do Not Resuscitate registry.   You make your choice, your file your authorization.   Register it by your Social Insurance number.  Cross-reference it to your Driver's Licence number and your street address and any other suitable means of verification.

Require the paramedics to verify your identity.  Usually the wallet is on site.  Have then log on to an internet directory and, from that, ascertain whether any DNR authorization exists.

We demean ourselves and our humanity when we dismiss our right to die as subordinate to the interests of the state.  We deserve better than the treatment that is left to us at the very time we are most powerless to fight back.  It is time we had the right to die on our own terms, not the state's.

BC Court Strikes Down Ban on Assisted Suicide

It's about time.  A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has upheld a terminally ill woman's right to physician-assisted suicide.

Justice Lynn Smith held the ban to be discriminatory and unconstitutional.   The woman, who has late-stage ALS, was represented by veteran lawyer Joe Arvay.

"I describe the evidence and the legal arguments that have led me to conclude that the plaintiffs succeed in their challenge,” Smith wrote at the beginning of her 395-page ruling. “They succeed because the provisions unjustifiably infringe on the equality rights of Gloria Taylor and the rights of life, liberty and security of the person.”

One can merely guess how long it will take Harper to launch an appeal and force this woman through an agonizing, drawn out death.

No matter how you feel about this, and most of us come down strongly on one side or the other, you really should consider your views in light of Oregon's physician-assisted suicide legislation, the state's Death With Dignity Act.   Oregon allows residents with advanced cases of terminal illness to apply to undergo a detailed process by which, after counselling and careful medical review, the person can obtain lethal medications for voluntary self-administration.   The state's experience has found that many who obtain prescriptions for these medications either never fill the prescriptions or never take the end of life drugs.   They merely die naturally free of the fear of having to endure unbearable pain.

You have to be diabolical to deny the terminally ill the right to die free of that grotesque fear.

Nature Finally Intervened to Relieve Sam Golubchuk

Sam Golubchuk won't have to wait until the end of September to hear his family argue that he ought to remain on life support no matter how long it took him to rot into oblivion. Nature finally overwhelmed the best of medical science and kicked Sam off life support.

Golubchuk's family who, unlike Sam, weren't rotting alive felt that Sam's parting should be in God's hands. The part they left out (and isn't there always one?) is that the only thing keeping their father out of God's hands these past many months was an array of machines and products pumped into the old guy that allowed his heart to keep beating after the rest of him had gone wherever one goes at the end.

The Golubchuk case strained medical and legal ethics. A number of physicians at Winnipeg's Grace Hospital resigned rather than keep putting the old man through procedures they deemed futile and grotesque. And the Manitoba courts, instead of expediting the hearing of the family's demands to keep Sam going no matter what, simply moved the trial date from December to late September. I think a courageous judge would have given them two weeks to get their witnesses together and argue their case. There's no way of knowing for sure but I suspect the Winnipeg judges just decided to kick the can, with Sam inside, right down the road, hoping it would be over before the trial date ever rolled around.

CANADA - please stand up for S. Golubchuck

What in God's name is wrong with Manitoba judges? Doctors are resigning rather than force treatment on an essentially-dead man knowing that would be nothing shy of grotesque torture.

This is being portrayed as a clash of medical ethics but it's much more than that, it's a collapse of the will of our legal system.

The Manitoba court ordered hospital physicians to keep 84-year old Samuel Golubchuck alive, regardless of the consequences, until the court can get off its fat, lazy ass and hear the question in late September? This poor man is already essentially dead and the Manitoba court wants to keep him on some respiratory and circulatory treadmill until "cottage time" has comfortably ended. And his very flesh is rotting away before our own eyes. Doesn't Sam deserve a lot better than this? What kind of people could, quite knowingly, subject another human being to this fate? I sure couldn't, could you?

If this court has a shred of integrity, it'd get off its sackcloth and silk backside and direct expedited argument, perhaps within a day. A court with even a modicum of courage would respect any ( and definitely your and mine) Canadian's life enough to expedite this. If the victim was us, would any of us not want just that degree of respect and consideration?

There's a powerful smell about this. Judges who aren't willing to put Golubchuk where he deserves to be - front and centre - but who will duck and weave and dodge, seemingly hoping that he'll be gone before they can possibly be forced to rule.

If the courts won't stand up for Golubchuk and his right to face inevitable death without outside contrivance tantamount to torture, then we're going to have to.

This just has to stop. People - we can't have this in Canada!