A Farewell to a great man

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the death of famed British neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks.

1993: Portrait of British-born neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks standing in the admittance driveway of Beth Abraham Hospital with his arms crossed over his chest, New York City. (Photo by Nancy R. Schiff/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
1993: Portrait of British-born neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks standing in the admittance driveway of Beth Abraham Hospital with his arms crossed over his chest, New York City.

In February, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times revealing that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer, after earlier melanoma in his eye spread to his liver.

“It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he wrote. “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”

Earlier this summer I read Dr Sacks’s memoir, On the Move. I love it. It’s an interesting memoir by a fascinating personality. And while reading I discovered that we had a dear friend in common, Thom Gunn. What a small world! So I decided to send him a note.

Dear Dr Sacks,

I just finished reading your memoir, On The Move. What an amazing life you’ve lived.on-the-move-by-oliver-sacks

Of all the marvelous things you’ve done and all the fascinating people you mentioned in your book nothing surprised me more than your close friendship with Thom Gunn. I was a friend of Thom too and I lived directly across Cole Street from him. I moved to the flat at 1207 Cole Street in 1979. At the time I was working on my doctorate in clinical sexology at the Institute For The Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.

I didn’t know Thom well at first. However, I would regularly see him walking both in our neighborhood and elsewhere in town. He was always in his leathers, rain or shine, and used to think to myself, “What a mensch!”

It finally dawned on me that he lived across the street from me.

Once he saw me in my roman collar. (I was ordained a catholic priest in 1975 at the age of 25 in Oakland, CA. I had come out to my local superiors; I was a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, before I was ordained. Like I said, I was working on my doctorate to become a sex therapist and prepare for an upfront gay ministry.) Thom smiled at me when he saw me; I blushed and told him what I just told you. He was fascinated, but I also believe he thought I was a twit. He probably was right.

I knew nothing about Thom other than he was my neighbor. Then one day I was in a bookstore on Haight Street and there was a photo of Thom in the window advertising a reading. That’s when I started asking around about him. Despite his cult status within the gay community, he was the most unassuming person. I was honored to have a personal connection with him.small_front

I finished my doctorate in 1981. My dissertation, Gay Catholic Priests; A Study of Cognitive and Affective Dissonance was directed by Wardell Pomeroy. A firestorm of media attention followed. The media branded me as THE gay priest, as if. I think Thom read about me in the New York Times because next time he saw me he clapped me on the back and said, “Well done.”

No sooner did I complete my doctorate, and because of the media attention my public coming out caused, the leadership of my religious community in Rome began a process of dismissal against me. I was devastated and lost. I was even getting death threats. Thom was always so supportive and encouraging.

I fought the church for the next thirteen years in an effort to save my priesthood and ministry. Alas, the writing was on the wall back in 1981 and it was only a matter of time till they had their way with me. I wrote about the travail in a book that was published in 2011, Secrecy, Sophistry and Gay Sex In The Catholic Church: The Systematic Destruction of an Oblate Priest.

Thom was always so solicitous about my wellbeing. He knew how difficult life had become for me. And both of us found ourselves on the forefront of caring for friends who were dying of AIDS. One of my landlords died in 1986.

Thom introduced my housemate and I to Augie Kleinzahler and his girlfriend, Caroline Lander, who lived only a few blocks from us in Cole Valley. We all became great friends and copious amounts of strong drink were consumed. I wonder, do you know Augie?

When Thom turned sixty I surprised him with a homemade German chocolate cake. I told him he was the oldest person I knew. This made him laugh and he called me a whippersnapper.

In 1992 the surviving landlord sold the Cole Street duplex and I and my housemate moved to Oak and Ashbury. Sadly, I didn’t get to see Thom as much as before. I move up here to Seattle in 1999 because I could no longer afford to live in SF. I was deeply saddened to learn of Thom’s death in 2004. He was such a great guy, what a marvelous soul.

Again, thank you for your memoir; it was grand getting to know you on a personal level. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat when it came out in the mid-eighties and loved it. But I never guessed you and Thom knew each other or that you actually visited him when I lived across the street from him. What a small world. I wish I had known you back then.

Anyhow, thank you for the bringing me this unexpected flood of memories of Thom. I wonder what he would have made of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision (Obergefell v. Hodges). I contend that we got marriage equality only because we walked through AIDS first. I think Thom would have agreed with me.

All the best,
richard

Richard Wagner, M.Div., Ph.D., ACS

To my astonishment, Oliver wrote back; I mean that literally, a handwritten note. Apparently, he never used a computer.

Dear Dr. Wagner (can I say Richard?), 6/60/15

I am greatly interested and greatly moved, by your letter — your courage in being honest and forthright, at a time and on a subject bound, sooner or later, to cause your ejection from the priesthood. In another few years perhaps, with Pope Francis at the helm, these last bastions of Catholic bigotry may have fallen.

I like to think of you as living across the street when I visited Thom, and glad to know that he appreciated you and your works. I still miss him deeply — there were not too many people with whim I could be entirely open — and I like to think that his ghost is pleased that my title came from his poem. (I find it a huge relief being open now to all and sundry {Oliver came out earlier this year} — I am so glad I completed my book before I became ill).

And what a liberation, an affirmation for us all that the Supreme Court voted as it did. I suspect that Ruth Bader Ginsberg, quite ill now, stayed on to ensure the 5/4 decision.

Thanks for your letter and my very best wishes,

Oliver

Oliver Sacks01 Oliver Sacks02

Click on this link to see a copy of Oliver Sacks’s note.

Thank you Dr Sacks and farewell!

A man planted a 4-mile stretch of beautiful sunflowers to honor his late wife

BY CHLOE BRYAN

After Don Jaquish’s wife, Babbette, passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer in November, Jaquish created a blooming sunflower memorial in Wisconsin — one that he says captures his partner’s personality perfectly.

“She’s always loved flowers, but sunflowers were her favorite,” Jacquish told ABC 13 News Now. “They fit her personality. She’d walk into a room and her smile would light up the whole room.”

Four years ago, at Babbette’s request, the Jaquishes started growing a field of sunflowers on their farm, planning to sell the seeds and use the proceeds to support other cancer patients.

After Babbette passed away, Don continued the project, eventually planting more than four miles of sunflowers that now stretch across multiple fields and farms — many of which Jaquish was granted access to by generous neighbors.

 

 


Jaquish has also founded Babbette’s Seeds of Hope, a new division of his farming operation dedicated to carrying on Babbette’s legacy. Seeds from his sunflowers will be packaged as bird seed and sold in packets with Babette’s smiling face on the front.

“She was a pretty modest person and I’m not so sure she’d want her picture on the bag,” Jaquish told ABC. “But she’s such a beautiful woman. She didn’t really know how beautiful she was, inside and out.”

Four months after his wife’s death, Jaquish discovered a note she’d left him. “You move on and live each day,” it reads. “Feel me in the morning air, and when you wake up and make your coffee. I will be there always.”

Complete Article HERE!

Burial, cremation, or full fathom five? I can see the allure of a watery grave

By 

Eighty-five-year-old twins from Brooklyn are setting off on what they say will be their final voyage. Their plan to die at sea has an undeniable romance

Sunset over the sea
‘The sea is where we came from in the first place. There’s a definite romance to saying goodbye to the land, and setting sail for that last adventure.

The endlessness of the sea offers an eternal alternative. Perhaps if we just pushed off into it, we could escape death itself – as if its amniotic waters might be a return to a universal womb. After all, the sea is where we came from in the first place. There’s a definite romance to saying goodbye to the land, and setting sail for that last adventure.

Van and Carl Vollmer, 85-year-old twins from Brooklyn, certainly think so. The brothers are about to embark on the handsome 158ft, three-masted barquentine, the Peacemaker, on a round-the-world voyage in search of remote islands and sunken galleons, from the Panama Canal to the Great Barrier Reef, the Philippines, and on to the Mediterranean.

In order to get there, the pair – who currently live on a powerboat moored on City Island – have bill-posted Brooklyn’s hipster district of Williamsburg with an enticing proposition: “Brooklyn sea captain seeking crew!” They’re advertising for a 12-strong, able-bodied crew of men and women, including a mechanic, deckhand, cook, nutritionist and an aquaponic gardener to grow vegetables on top of fish tanks – a kind of hip 21st-century version of Ahab’s crew on the Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. They’ll even get suitably retro uniforms of old-fashioned sailor pants with 13 buttons and yellow-and-white striped shirts. I’m guessing they’ll all have beards already.

But instead of a demented captain suicidally spearing a great white whale, the Vollmer twins are instructing their shipmates that when the time comes, they’ll be glad to go over the side. “To swim with the fishes for eternity”, as Van Vollmer says. “We want to spend the rest of our lives on this boat”, Carl adds. “We want to get thrown overboard”. Melville, who lived and died by the New York waterfront, would approve of such wild ambition. Having ended his own life as an ageing customs inspector on the Manhattan wharves looking out longingly to sea, the great writer probably wished he had done the same. Indeed, it’s a scene reminiscent of his last, elegiac seafaring tale, Billy Budd, whose protagonist ends up consigned to the deep: “…roll me over fair! / I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.”

But not everyone is happy about the Vollmers’ intentions. At least one crew member, Steven, chosen by the twins as their first mate, is equivocal about this duty. “Van kind of brings it up and he’s like, ‘I want to teach you everything I know so when you dump me into the sea you can take over.’ I’m hoping that’s just some kind of expression. It’s not something I really want to think about.”

Not going gently into the good night but raging against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas recommended, has a long maritime tradition. It is an ambition peculiarly suited to the sea – particularly in our fractured archipelago of the British Isles. In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Mr Peggotty, the Yarmouth fisherman, says of his brother-in-law Mr Barkis as he lies dying: “People can’t die, along the coast … except when the tide’s pretty nigh out … He’s going out with the tide. It’s ebb at half-arter three, slack water half-an-hour. If he lives till it turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.” Nowadays, anyone hoping to swim with the fishes in eternity without going to the bother of sailing into the blue yonder can opt for burial at sea off the Isle of Wight, in a designated zone.

Meanwhile, the modern Odysseus takes to the ocean liner. Wealthy wanderers of a certain age have sold up on land to live at sea in permanently rented suites. A somewhat ominous-sounding company called Utopia caters to those who intend to spend the rest of their lives on the briny, while US websites discuss the practicalities, pondering, “Is cruise ship retirement cheaper than assisted living?”.

Beatrice Muller thought so. After her husband died on the QE2 as it sailed out of Bombay in 1999, she announced her intention to live on the liner till the end of her days, paying £3,500 a month for the privilege. Unfortunately for Mrs Muller, she outlasted the ship; it went into retirement in 2008. And although the stalwart senior citizen continued to defy the land – “I’ll keep on staying at sea”, she said, aged 89, “I don’t want to go back to housekeeping” – sadly, she seems to have ended up in a retirement home in New Jersey.

As someone who swims in the sea every day, I’ve often considered it as my last resting place; that like Barkis, I might be taken out with the tide. After all, I wouldn’t be using up valuable land space, or contributing to climate change. It sounds almost idyllic. “Full fathom five my father lies”, as Ariel sings in The Tempest, “Of his bones are coral made”, transformed “into something rich and strange”. But then I think of how lonely it might be, nibbled away by crawling slimy things where “the very deep did rot”, as the fated Ancient Mariner saw it. And would I really want to be recycled by lobsters, to end up in the food chain? Perhaps it’s not such a reassuring thought after all.

Complete Article HERE!

A Racial Gap In Attitudes Toward Hospice Care

By Sarah Varney

Pastor Vernal Harris and his wife Narseary Harris before regular church services at Prince of Peace Temple in Buffalo, N.Y. After experiencing hospice care during the death of their son Solomon, Harris and his wife have become advocates of Hospice care for the terminally ill in the communities they serve. (Photo by Brendan Bannon for The New York Times)
Pastor Vernal Harris and his wife Narseary Harris before regular church services at Prince of Peace Temple in Buffalo, N.Y. After experiencing hospice care during the death of their son Solomon, Harris and his wife have become advocates of Hospice care for the terminally ill in the communities they serve.

BUFFALO — Twice already Narseary and Vernal Harris have watched a son die. The first time — Paul, at age 26 — was agonizing and frenzied, his body tethered to a machine meant to keep him alive as his incurable sickle cell disease progressed. When the same illness ravaged Solomon, at age 33, the Harrises reluctantly turned to hospice in the hope that his last days might somehow be less harrowing than his brother’s.

Their expectations were low. “They take your money,” Mrs. Harris said, describing what she had heard of hospice. “Your loved ones don’t see you anymore. You just go there and die.”

Hospice use has been growing fast in the United States as more people choose to avoid futile, often painful medical treatments in favor of palliative care and dying at home surrounded by loved ones. But the Harrises, who are African-American, belong to a demographic group that has long resisted the concept and whose suspicions remain deep-seated.

It is an attitude borne out by recent federal statistics showing that nearly half of white Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in hospice before death, compared with only a third of black patients. The racial divide is even more pronounced when it comes to advance care directives — legal documents meant to help families make life-or-death decisions that reflect a patient’s choices. Some 40 percent of whites aged 70 and over have such plans, compared with only 16 percent of blacks.

Instead, black Americans — far more so than whites — choose aggressive life-sustaining interventions, including resuscitation and mechanical ventilation, even when there is little chance of survival.

The racial gaps could widen when Medicare is expected to begin paying physicians in January 2016 for end-of-life counseling, and at a time when blacks and other minorities are projected to make up 42 percent of people 65 and over in 2050, up from 20 percent in 2000.

At the root of the resistance, say researchers and black physicians, is a toxic distrust of a health care system that once displayed “No Negroes” signs at hospitals, performed involuntary sterilizations on black women and, in an infamous Tuskegee study, purposely left hundreds of black men untreated for syphilis.

maisha1
Dr. Maisha Robinson, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“You have people who’ve had a difficult time getting access to care throughout their lifetimes” because of poverty, lack of health insurance or difficulty finding a medical provider, said Dr. Maisha Robinson, a neurologist and palliative medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. “And then you have a physician who’s saying, ‘I think that we need to transition your mother, father, grandmother to comfort care or palliative care.’ People are skeptical of that.”

Federal policies surrounding hospice also arouse suspicion in black communities since Medicare currently requires patients to give up life-sustaining therapies in order to receive hospice benefits.

That trade-off strikes some black families, who believe they have long had to fight for quality medical care, as unfair, said Dr. Kimberly Johnson, a Duke University associate professor of medicine who has studied African-American attitudes about hospice.

Dr. Johnson said her black patients were more likely to believe there are actual religious prohibitions against limiting life-sustaining therapy, and that suffering can be redemptive, or “a test from God.” And those beliefs, she added, were “contrary to the hospice philosophy of care.”

But now some doctors and clergy members are trying to use church settings to reshape the black community’s views, incorporating the topic in sermons, Bible study groups and grief and bereavement ministries.

Dr. Robinson, who is black and a daughter of Tennessee pastors, has been helping pastors develop faith-based hospice guidelines. She tells them, “God can work miracles, yes he can, but even in hospice.”

That message recently rang out from the pulpit at God Answers Prayer Ministries, an African- American church in South Los Angeles, as Bishop Gwendolyn Coates-Stone tried a sermon theme on advance care.

“It’s such a great cost to hold on to some of those sicknesses and diseases that eventually are going to take us out,” she exclaimed into a microphone, bobbing and weaving in a swirl of royal purple robes. “Just like Jesus talked about his death and prepared his disciples for his death, we ought to be preparing our disciples for our death!”

In a moment of benediction, Bishop Coates-Stone made a direct plea: “Help us Lord to have the courage to have conversations with our families,” she said, “that will also not leave them wandering and wondering, ‘What should I do in case of the death of a loved one?’”

A gathering of older blacks convened recently by Dr. Robinson in Leimert Park, a middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood, underscored the challenges such efforts still face.

“Hospice has not been a good place for African-Americans, unless you’re in a white facility and usually you’re one of few black people there,” said one woman, who along with others attending the gathering asked not to be identified in order to speak frankly.

That sentiment was greeted by nods from others in the group. “It gets into money,” another woman said. “The treatment is a little bit better, but then there is still the discrimination.”

Advance directives, in particular, are often seen as sinister, a way for insurance companies to maximize profits. “If you say you want at all costs to live, and they say, ‘Well, your insurance company doesn’t allow that,’ then they’re going to pull the plug anyway,” said the host of the gathering, Loretta Jones, 73, founder of Healthy African-American Families in Los Angeles.

To help allay those concerns, physicians need to be more explicit during end-of-life discussions, Dr. Robinson said. “We have to be much clearer about why we’re trying to have those conversations, or we’ll continue to see a pattern of people who really want life-sustaining interventions even when there’s limited potential benefit.”

Camille Wicher, vice president of clinical operations at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, who has studied African-Americans’ end-of-life choices, said hospitals needed to enlist black families who have had good hospice experiences to share their stories with friends and church members.

“That’s how we learn,” she added. “We learn from each other.”

The Harrises are trying to use their experience to carry out that work.

The agony of their son Paul’s death in a hospital room informed their treatment decisions when their next son, Solomon, became gravely ill. When his doctor conceded that blood transfusions were of little help, Solomon assented to hospice care in his parents’ home. If he was going to be robbed of his future, Solomon would not, his parents decided, be robbed of a good death.

 

As his health failed, nurses from the hospice in Buffalo managed his pain and bathed him tenderly. A social worker helped the family grieve and counseled his young children.

All the while, parishioners from his parents’ church visited Solomon, amazed to find that hospice was not the grim banishment they had always envisioned.

“One of the members said, ‘I thought you were going to put Solomon in hospice,’ ” Mrs. Harris recalled. “I said, ‘We did.’ ‘Well, when is he going?’ I said, ‘They come here.’ ‘They come to your house?’ ‘Yeah, they’re taking care of him right here.’ ”

There was even time for reflection, as Solomon wrote in a poem called “After Life.”

“Fear death?” he wrote. “No, I await death.”

Solomon died a short while later, but the Harrises say his death has had a lasting impact.

“The people in our immediate circle now view hospice positively,” Mrs. Harris said. “I think our experience was powerful enough that it changed people’s attitudes.”

Mr. Harris, the pastor of Prince of Peace Temple Church of God in Christ, often evangelizes about hospice during his Sunday morning sermons, while Mrs. Harris has enlisted the wives of black pastors in Western New York, known as the “First Ladies,” to counter negative views about palliative care. At a recent meeting, the women discussed older church members who might benefit from hospice, and Mrs. Harris wanted to hear how parishioners in the women’s churches responded to some recent outreach.

“It really opened up people’s eyes to the negative stigma of it, feeling like, ‘I’m just putting my loved one away, and not caring for them,’ ” said Joyce Badger of Bethesda World Harvest International Church in Buffalo. “The power of knowledge that we’ve gained is really going to help our community.”

Complete Article HERE!

The Liberty to End One’s Life

How the marriage equality movement led the way for death with dignity.

By

terminally ill.
As the death with dignity movement builds a critical mass, social and political pressure may force even conservative states to consider easing restrictions on physician-aided suicide.

Aja Riggs doesn’t want the state of New Mexico to dictate how she’ll die. Riggs suffers from uterine cancer—currently in remission, but likely to return—and fears it will leave her in excruciating pain during her final days. To avoid so much torment, Riggs wants to be sure her doctor can ease her into death through a painless overdose if she so chooses. But New Mexico law prohibits physician-assisted suicide. So Riggs, along with two oncologists, is suing to have the statute struck down as a violation of her fundamental rights under the state constitution.

Initially, Riggs scored a major win in a state district court, which found that terminally ill patients have a fundamental liberty interest in securing assisted suicide. Earlier this month, however, an appeals court reversed that ruling. The setback is probably temporary. Bolstered by a blistering, incisive dissent, Riggs is taking her case to the progressive state Supreme Court. There, she hopes she can persuade the justices to force New Mexico to respect the legal rights of dying patients.

Court challenges to assisted suicide bans are nothing new. In a 1997 case calledWashington v. Glucksberg, a badly fractured U.S. Supreme Court rejected a broad challenge to Washington’s prohibition. Five members of the court held that the right “to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interested protected by the Due Process Clause.” Only “those personal activities and decisions” that are “deeply rooted in our history and traditions,” the majority wrote, are protected by the Constitution—and assisted suicide is not “deeply rooted” in the American tradition. At the same time, five justices also found that “suffering patients” may have “a constitutionally cognizable interest in obtaining relief from the suffering that they may experience in the last days of their lives.”

This apparently contradictory ruling was the handiwork of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. A consummate baby-splitter, O’Connor tried to bridge the gap between the court’s liberal and conservative blocs. Instead, she created a paradoxical ruling that has, ever since, stood on extremely shaky constitutional grounds. In fact, the court’s recent ruling in the same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges seriously dented the validity of Glucksberg by replacing its crabbed logic with a more modern, expansive definition of “liberty.” (Chief Justice John Roberts accused the Obergefellmajority of “effectively overruling” Glucksberg—as though that’s a bad thing.)

The New Mexico Constitution has a due process clause that’s virtually identical to the one in the United States Constitution, which holds in the Fifth and 14th amendments that no one shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Like the federal version, New Mexico’s protects substantive rights fundamental to individual dignity and autonomy. But the New Mexico Supreme Court has declared that its state constitution may be interpreted more expansively, to encompass a grander definition of individual dignity. Riggs argues that the New Mexico Constitution should protect her right to choose when to end her suffering.

001In a somewhat apologetic decision, the court of appeals refused to allow this more generous reading, holding that the state may force a terminally ill patient in extreme agony to remain alive until her life reaches “its natural end.” But in dissent, Judge Linda M. Vanzi laid waste to the majority’s argument, writing that it “reflects a shocking disrespect for the individuals whose circumstances would bring them to seek aid in dying.” Vanzi first notes, correctly, that Obergefell seriously erodes—and maybe even overrules—Glucksberg. (Same-sex marriage, after all, certainly isn’t “deeply rooted” in American history.) She then explains that even ifGlucksberg remained good law, she would “reject it as unpersuasive, flawed, and inadequate to protect the rights of New Mexicans.” Instead, Vanzi writes that New Mexico’s own traditional respect for individual autonomy should lead the court to hold that the state’s citizens have a “liberty right to aid in dying from a willing physician.”

And if New Mexico’s due process clause implies this right, another provision all but demands it. In a passage unique to the New Mexico Constitution, “all persons” in the state are promised “natural, inherent and inalienable rights.” Among these are “the rights of enjoying and defending life and liberty … and of seeking and obtaining safety and happiness.” This provision, Vanzi asserts, “affords New Mexico citizens the right and agency to defend their lives and liberty by availing themselves of aid in dying” when terminally ill. The state simply cannot justify “intrud[ing] upon the doctor-patient relationship as it relates to the constitutional right to aid in dying.” Vanzi concludes:

The question at the heart of this case is who has the right to decide when and how a mentally competent, terminally ill New Mexican will end her life after the options for meaningful improvement of her terminal condition have been exhausted, such that “life” means being forced to endure unbearable suffering until death arrives. … Other choices and decisions central to personal autonomy and dignity have long enjoyed the status of constitutionally protected liberty interests. I would hold that the New Mexico Constitution protects aid in dying as a liberty interest.

Vanzi’s brave, powerful dissent is likely to become a rallying cry for the death with dignity movement. But it is also aimed squarely at the New Mexico Supreme Court itself, to which Riggs will appeal her case. There, she may have more luck: All five justices are Democrat-affiliated and have proven quite liberal on issues of personal dignity, including marriage equality. Should they side with Riggs, New Mexico will become the fifth state where terminally ill patients are afforded the liberty to end their lives. That might help create momentum in other states whose legislatures are considering assisted suicide measures.

As the death with dignity movement builds a critical mass, social and political pressure may force even conservative states to consider easing restrictions on physician-aided suicide. This model worked gangbusters with same-sex marriage, and death with dignity advocates are clearly hoping to employ it for their own cause. Eventually, they may even achieve an Obergefell­-type ruling for the movement declaring that the American conception of liberty includes a right for terminally ill patients to choose when to die.

Of course, opponents of physician-assisted suicide like to argue that legislatures, not the courts, should decide the legality of the practice. Yet the constitutional guarantees of life and liberty ring hollow if patients like Aja Riggs are deprived the liberty to end their own lives.

Complete Article HERE!

Therapy Dog Gently Comforts Hospice Patient While They Both Listen To Poetry

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By Regina Lizik

JJ the dog has a very special job. She’s a therapy dog who spends a lot of her time comforting patients at a hospice in Oregon. Recently, JJ’s mom, nurse Tracy Calhoun, posted a video one of JJ’s therapy sessions to Facebook.

It shows JJ comforting a patient who, sadly, does not receive many visitors. Her time with the pup is very precious. In the video, they spend their time sharing snuggles and listening to a poem by W.B. Yeats.

JJ’s mom translated the pup’s dog thoughts on Facebook:

“She cannot see and often does not wake up, but she did like having her hand on my fur. She was very calm during my visit. We were listening to Yeats, by the way. I was very insistent to have her touch me, more so than usual. We fell asleep later with her hand splayed on my head, both of us snoring.”

You can follow JJ’s amazing work on her Facebook page.

Complete Article HERE!

I Asked Doctors How They Would Prefer To Die

What care do doctors want to have when they reach the end of their lives?

By 

Isobel El-Shanawany, GP

“The hospital is my safe place. When I had my baby, I wanted the labour ward. I wanted to hear the beeps, people rushing around, that makes me feel secure. But I know full well that hospital is not a nice place when you’re 80 years old and dying.

“I’m 36. It’s so difficult to think of yourself as an 80-year-old frail person. Knowing what I know, I think I’d want less intervention than most patients seem to want. Patients have watched ridiculous programmes on telly, and think that CPR does work, and that they can be brought back from the dead and have a lovely happy life. In reality, it doesn’t happen.

“I wouldn’t want to go to intensive care unless they knew that I had a reversible cause and the outlook was good. I certainly wouldn’t want artificial feeding. It’s hard to look ahead. Now, as the mother of a 3-year-old who needs me, I’d probably say I want everything possible done just in case the outlook could be good and I could be there for him, but trying to picture myself as an 80-year-old is quite different. I think if you were to ask most doctors where they would want to die, they’d say at home, with the people who love them.

“On my first job, I just didn’t understand why with one patient we weren’t doing everything we could be doing, and my consultant said, ‘You have to learn when you’re prolonging life and when you’re prolonging death.’ It sounds cheesy, but it’s true, and it’s a fine line. So much of what we can do does prolong death, and prolongs pain.”

Kate Stein, child and adolescent psychiatrist

“What would I want? It depends. If I was a little old lady, and I was really fragile and I’d had a good innings, I think I wouldn’t particularly want the resus, the whole caboodle, because you crack people’s ribs and it’s really quite undignified and you very rarely get them back. But of course I’d want people to try their absolute hardest if I had some weird cardiac problem and I suddenly collapsed next week. I’d really want people to work hard on me in that case.

“For all the cardiac arrests that I saw in A&E, I never saw anyone come back, and it was always people who’d been dead for quite a long time. There was one girl who was young, my age; she was epileptic and had had a seizure in the bath. It was awful. I think we tried to resuscitate her for literally an hour, but it was obvious that she was dead on arrival.

“I’ve cracked ribs before, and it’s not nice. The sound of a cracking rib is haunting, and it happens, especially with the big guys who do CPR in A&E. It doesn’t happen every time, but it often does, and it’s not very nice.

“As doctors you see the practicalities of these interventions, of tube feeding and ventilation and so on. You’re not shielded from that stuff. I’ve always said that if I were to develop some chronic thing, god forbid, like motor neurone or something, I’d definitely want to have the option of going to Dignitas and being able to control it in my own way. I’m sure that’s been guided by my experience as a doctor. Personally, I’d rather have that option, so my last moments can be with my loved ones, drinking my favourite wine, listening to my favourite music, rather than in a grotty hospital somewhere.”

Anonymous, GP

“I’ve been involved in countless attempts to resuscitate patients, with varying degrees of success. I have also had to care for people kept alive solely with feeding tubes, living in nursing homes, rarely visited by family.

“I wouldn’t want CPR unless I have the good fortune to keel over in a district general hospital or outside an ambulance station. I have seen too many partially successful resusses that have resulted in significant damage and next to no quality of life for the patients involved. Often the resus attempt is done for the benefit of the relatives in attendance. Resus on TV gives a skewed idea of success rates, unless they have the magic touch on Holby City. If I’m in a coma, I would prefer that, once all reversible causes have been eliminated, no artificial feeding be instituted and that I be allowed to drift away in a haze of opiates.

“I strongly believe that my job as a doctor is to attempt to cure illness, when possible, but [also] to recognise when the time has come to shift emphasis and then ensure that the life my patient has left is as symptom-free and pain-free as possible – following a full and frank discussion with the patient.

“My own father had the foresight to arrange a lasting power of attorney – six weeks before he died, spookily enough. As part of this process we discussed what his wishes were in the event of various scenarios. When his abdominal aortic aneurysm ruptured six weeks later I was able to inform the A&E staff of his wish NOT to be resuscitated and he was kept alive long enough for all his children to be in attendance to say their last goodbyes. I would strongly urge everyone to set this process in motion and have this conversation.”

Pascale Lane, paediatric nephrologist

“I’m only 54 and I hope this doesn’t come up for some time! However, I certainly would not want a lot of the heroics that are offered in current intensive care.

“When I have what will likely be my terminal illness, I don’t want CPR or other measures. If I’m in a coma, I don’t want to be kept alive with feeding tubes or other artificial means. These treatments often prolong dying rather than adding any meaningful period of life.”

Rachel Boyce, GP

“I’m 38, I have a young family, and I’m in good health. If I had a severe and acute illness tomorrow, I’d hope someone would attempt to save me, because there’s a realistic chance of living a useful life. Fast-forward 40 years, it would be a different story. Because of what I’ve seen, I would not want to end up on intensive care unit in my seventies. I would be horrified to be put through what patients are put through. If someone has a massive heart attack on a hospital ward or at home, they are already dead. CPR can bring them back to life, but they don’t sit up and rub their chests saying ‘phew’. They will end up with a tube in their trachea, lines coming out of them. Many who do survive have brain damage. The media has a lot to answer for in terms of public perception of the success of CPR.

“Similarly, if I were diagnosed with cancer, I would think very carefully about whether to go through treatment. If I had something with a good cure rate, bring it on. But if I had, say, an oesophageal or pancreatic tumour, I would think hard before putting myself through any chemo or radiotherapy. These treatments are grim, might buy you a few months, but a lot of the time are futile. I am often staggered at what patients are put through in the hope of buying a few poor quality months of life.

“My grandfather had a massive stroke during heart surgery in his eighties and he ended up in a nursing home for two years, bed-bound, only eating puréed food. Was I glad he survived the operation? Not really. If he’d died from his stroke, we wouldn’t have had a chance to say goodbye, but dear god, he wouldn’t have suffered the way he did. I don’t actually have an advanced directive [aka living will] but I would definitely get one if I were diagnosed with MS or cancer or have a stroke. I would also seriously consider the Dignitas route, if euthanasia is not legalised in this country, but that’s another article…”

Anonymous, pharmaceutical physician

“Doctors have a jaded view of the various end-of-life interventions. This is mainly because we’ve seen how ineffective and brutal they often are. I think every medic will carry with them to the grave the sound/sensation of fracturing a bunch of ribs in an aged chest during a bout of (invariably unsuccessful) CPR. It’s profoundly unpleasant, believe me. CPR really only saves lives when young, healthy people who suffer cardiac arrest out of the blue. If someone is old and unwell then a good outcome is extremely unlikely. I think that’s why most medics I know would be “do not resuscitate” if they were in hospital as an elderly patient.

“It’s a more complex when it comes to interventions like antibiotics, IV fluids, or food. That’s all about quality of life. I generally think docs are a bit more aware that delaying the inevitable is not necessarily a good thing, if that involves prolonging suffering. However, I think people in general are a bit more educated about that too. I get the impression that relatives are a bit more proactive when it comes to discussing end of life plans nowadays. These ‘end-of-life discussions’ are a very hot topic in medicine and a particularly tricky aspect of dealing with elderly or unwell patients.

“If I was fit and had a treatable illness, then they could do whatever they could. With a terminal illness and underlying poor health (e.g. if I’m very elderly) then I would not want any CPR, that’s for damn sure. I would want IV fluids, as dehydration is miserable, and I would like to make a decision about antibiotics on an infection-by-infection basis. I don’t think I would want nasogastric [tube up the nose] feeding, other than on an extremely temporary basis. A life where I can’t chew/savour food is probably not a life worth living.”

This doctor also sent a link to this research into how doctors’ experience affects their end-of-life decisions, and how often they end up doing things for patients which they wouldn’t want done themselves.

Natalie Silvey, trainee anaesthetist

“A commonly heard phrase when discussing what a patient would want when critically unwell is that they would ‘want everything done’. The longer I am a doctor, the more I worry about what that patient or their relatives think ‘everything’ is. I am becoming more and more clear about the things I wouldn’t want done if I should fall unwell suddenly. Which is why talking about death and end-of-life care is so important.

“If I had an acute medical condition that was reversible, then I would agree to most treatments. But I have been clear with my family that I wouldn’t want things like CPR, artificial feeding, or prolonged ventilation if I were to become unwell and if the doctors and others looking after me thought my chances were poor.

“CPR on TV drives me mad. It is completely unrealistic, and having been to many cardiac arrests now you see the reality, and I don’t think I would want that unless there was an easily reversible cause (which there very often isn’t). Of course, some people survive a cardiac arrest and go on to do very well. It isn’t an exact science, but I do know that I don’t want huge heroics unless there is a very good chance of survival. Perhaps it is because of seeing a lot of patients die in different ways and looking after them in a variety of settings; perhaps it is a fear of loss of control. But I do want to make an advance directive and I have spoken to my family about the type of things I would want. For example, I’m very clear that if there was any way I could donate my organs I would definitely want that.

“I just don’t want heroics. I want good pain relief and other symptom control, and not to be alone.”

Anonymous, consultant in emergency medicine

“I would want CPR, with the caveat that it’s a question of how futile it is. If I had a simple cardiac arrest, if my heart stopped but everything else was fine, then yes, I’d probably want it, because I’d have a pretty good predicted outcome. If, however, I’d been unwell for some time, and my kidneys had gone, and my lungs had gone, and because of that my heart stopped, then the chances of a meaningful recovery are much lower. Following a cardiac arrest you’re likely to head to ITU [intensive therapy unit], you’re likely to be there for some time, you’re likely looking at muscle wastage, and possibly pneumonia from the ventilation system.

“It’s about what your chances of having a meaningful life after it would be. It’s not beyond anyone’s understanding, but doctors have more experience of it. I will frequently be in a position of breaking bad news to somebody, or saying so-and-so’s very ill, and you have a discussion: You tell them that if they get so sick that their heart stops, then we might not be able to get them back, or if we do then they’ll be on an ITU for a long time, and they may not get better. When it’s explained in those terms, people who 20 minutes earlier were saying that Granny wants to hang on to life might start saying that, well, if she can’t tend her garden, maybe she wouldn’t. It’s a question of explaining the realities, explaining what it means to get so sick that your heart stops. If an intervention isn’t going to return me to a quality of life which I’d wish for, then I think that’s probably where the line is drawn.

“Regarding assisted suicide: I would feel very frustrated if I were in a position whereby I was incapacitated and didn’t have the option to end my life. It’s an option which everyone has while they’re walking and talking and moving around, but once you’re stuck in a chair, dependent on feeding tubes, that liberty is taken away from you. That’s not to say that we should have free rein and everyone should be rushing off to Dignitas – it must be done with education and discussion and a sense of fairness – but I think those who say it shouldn’t be an option are usually saying it in a position where you still have that option.”

Complete Article HERE!