Reg Crew: A Terminal Illness

Having the right to die is a very controversial and popular topic. It is so popular that it is even currently under debate. Having the right to die means that a terminally ill or chronically in pain patient would have the choice to medically end their life by way of medication or injection. Having the right to die can also mean choosing to be taken off machines that are keeping a person alive or it can mean being given a lethal concoction of medication in order to end a life. There are many different ways that right to die can be utilized. The basic procedures are simple in principle: Doctors certify that the patient qualifies under the law, by virtue of fulfilling the stated criteria then after appropriate waiting periods, the physician writes a prescription for life-ending chemicals. The laws do not specify how and when the patient should take the chemicals intended to bring immediate death, so that part of the process is left in the hands of the individuals(2007, January 1).

Lane talks about how euthanasia of mentally impaired patients is controversial. He provides the reader with descriptive details of a physician-suicide that occurred in the Netherlands in 2016. Lane describes the physician-assisted death of a 74-year-old woman that had dementia. The women did not provide a clear explanation of why she was wanting to have a lethal injection other than she was suffering from an uncurbable disease. The doctor sedated the elderly woman and she pulled back from the needle as the doctor was trying to locate a vein.

The dilemma for ethics committees brought up by the story of Patrick is a question of how much is too much. As technologies in the medical field continue to advance, people can live substantially longer lives, but are they lives worth living? Some people, like Patrick, don’t think being paralyzed is a quality of life worth living. Others, like Armando, refuse to be made DNR and cling to life even if it consists of communicating by blinking of the eye. The questions raised in this book are awful decisions that nobody should ever have to make. Whatever the committees and doctors choose to do can keep patients alive and allow them to have a low quality of live, be in constant pain and be a burden to society, or keep a terminally ill patient comfortable until he or she has said their good-byes and let nature take its course.

As the president of the British Medical Association and a professor of palliative medicine, Finley suggests that assisted dying as a personal choice has unacceptable social consequences, and defends the laws in place. She further implicates that dying patients struggle with depression depriving them of the ability to make a utilitarian decision about their own death. I question her objectivity on the matter because I feel as a palliative care physician she will naturally defend hospice care for the dying. Because I disagree with some of what she is saying she will represent my opposition: people who overlook that depriving patients of this very personal decision is in itself a violation of ethics. I will use her points to illustrate that true compassion does not end with relieving suffering and comfort care until natural death occurs.

The patient is experiencing a major illness or disease within their body. All patients who qualify for this act are terminally ill and have six months or less to live. They have exhausted all treatment options or are opting to forgo treatment in favor of quality and not quantity of life. The medications administered to facilitate dying cause CNS depression which lowers the heart rate and respirations and increases drowsiness causing sedation and then ultimately death.

Ethan Remmel, a Bellingham, WA resident, was only 41 when he died on June 13, 2011, a year after being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer that quickly spread to his bones. Ethan was a psychology professor and father of two young sons. He took a lethal dose of crushed prescription sedatives to end his life. He was able to legally obtain that prescription from his physician under the state’s 2009 Death with Dignity Act. The law allows people living with deadly illnesses maintain control over their lives. Having that control maintained seems to improve the quality of life for someone at the end of their life. Dr. Remmel’s quality of life was critical to his happiness.

Making the decision not to exercise one’s right-to-die approach comes at a heavy cost. Davila (63) argues that the high costs that those seeking futile healthcare for the most inevitable deaths is an issue that can no longer be sidelined. The expense is not just

Dr. Jack Kevorkian more commonly known as Dr. Death is greatly known for his opinion that euthanasia should be legalized and his work with patients seeking help. He was very important in showing euthanasia and voicing his opinion on the subject so the public could not ignore the importance of the matter. Dr. Kevorkian was said to have been involved with 130 suicides by patients who wanted to end their own lives (Nicol and Wylie 17). He had two machines he used to help the patients, one an injection and the other a mask, however both machines were operated by the patient and although Dr. Kevorkian was taken to court many times for these he was not convicted because the patient was in control. He was very careful as to not actually commit the act himself until he was contacted by Thomas Youk, a young with Lou Gheric’s disease; Lou Gheric’s disease is when the muscle stop working and eventually the patient chokes to death. Tom’s condition prevented him from actually operating the machines and therefore Dr. Kevorkian decided that he would operate the machine himself because he cared greatly about all his patients and could not let Tom live in his constant fear (Nicol and Wylie 11). Dr. Kevorkian taped Tom’s wishes and then himself hooking up the machine and pushing the button to inject the drugs. He then proceed to

in Petrou 23). Had Hans Knottenbelt been living in any of the forty-nine out of fifty American states where euthanasia is illegal, the sight of his death would have been anything but beautiful. His daughter describes what an average night was like for her father while he was suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease: "My Dad woke up in the evenings like a scared rabbit. He was so scared. Not scared of dying, but scared of suffocation, of the way he would die" (qtd. in Petrou 22). Without the option of peacefully ending his life, Knottenbelt's fears would have become reality. The most likely scenario would have been for him to wake up in the middle of the night and discover his airway blocked up with fluids. In a panic, he would have furiously rung the bell beside his bed to alert his family he needed help, as he did on a near nightly basis. This time his help would either arrive too late, or be unable to clear his windpipe. Knottenbelt would have died in one of the most excruciating ways imaginable. The unlucky family member who had come to his side to try to help him would be forced to watch him violently struggle for air right up until the moment of his death.

It is argued that patients requesting help with hastening death come mostly from those who have not been treated or diagnosed properly (Asch). “There is a growing awareness that loss of dignity and of those attributes that we associate particularly with being human are the factors that most commonly reduce patients to a state of unrelieved misery and desperation,” (Rogatz). It would be to the doctor’s discretion and expertise to diagnose and treat the patient to the best of their ability, and the patient could seek assistance from another doctor if looking for more

Margaret P. Battin’s “Euthanasia: The Way We Do It, the Way They Do It” discusses the occurrence and practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide in three first-world, industrialized, developed nations: The Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. All three of these countries have one important factor in common that makes them ideal for studying euthanasia: aging populations who primarily die of degenerative diseases, rather than parasitic or infectious diseases (Battin 579). In the United States, outright euthanasia is illegal. Rather, the accepted form of

Voluntary euthanasia may be looked down upon within active medical practices, although in some cases, the view of passive euthanasia is morally acceptable. For instance, within common life-threating illnesses, a patient will take extreme measures into

This type of euthanasia is practiced on persistent vegetative patients who cannot speak for themselves, but who have said in the past that they would not have wanted to live that way.

“Active euthanasia defines the practice where death is caused by direct administration of a lethal substance” (Sayers, 2005). Dr. Jack Kevorkian is a physician well known for his cases of physician assisted suicide. “In his writings and statements, Kevorkian advocates a society that allows euthanasia for the dying, the disabled, the mentally ill, infants with birth defects and comatose adults; and he sanctions experiments prior to their death and organ harvesting.” (Betzold, 1997). Many other physicians and also nurses have performed euthanasia causing public alarm that some cases are actually murder. In one such case a physician and his nurse, Dr. James Gallant decided to take a Ms. Clarietta Day life into his own hands: “Day collapsed on the phone while calling 911 in the early morning of March 22. She was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage (burst blood vessel in the brain), a condition that is invariably fatal. Sometime before she died, Day had filled out an advance directive, which included instructions from August 1995, in which she wrote that should she become unconscious, she wished to be kept alive for at least forty-eight hours. However, following the diagnosis, Day received painkillers every five to ten minutes for a four-hour period, even though there was no documentation that Day was in discomfort or agitated. She was removed from a respirator and had a magnet applied to her

Today we are face with death in a different setting then our ancestors, instead of dying at a younger age and dying in our home with our families, people are now dying at a hospital or in a medical setting. We are living longer because of the advances in medicine, this is causing us to develop diseases that our ancestors never had to face. Our ancestors did not live long enough to develop some of the diseases we face today. As Jones (2011) provides, “we don’t just die of different diseases then our ancestors, we also die in different circumstances” (p. 302). The changes in circumstances have caused us to reevaluate what is believed to be ethical when faced with dying. There are many medical options a terminal ill or elderly patient that is dying can choose from, however there is great debate whether some of these options are ethical.