Posted on 10/07/2014 7:03:22 AM PDT by Borges
A terminally ill 29-year-old woman has chosen November 1 as the day she will die.
Shortly after her wedding in 2013, Brittany Maynard of Portland, Ore., began experiencing debilitating headaches.
While on vacation with her husband in January, Brittany was diagnosed with grade II Astrocytoma, a severe brain tumor. Doctors told her she had 10 years left to live.
“I have to tell you,” she says in the video, “when you’re 29 years old, being told you have that kind of timeline still feels like being told you’re going to die tomorrow.”
Following the original diagnosis, doctors said her cancer had progressed to Glioblastoma multiforme, the deadliest form of brain cancer. After treatment, the average life expectancy is only 14 months.
When doctors told Brittany her death would likely be slow and painful as the tumor continued to grow, she opted to choose her own ending.
On November 1, surrounded by her husband, mother and best friend, she will end her life using medication prescribed by her doctor.
Maynard’s husband’s birthday is October 30.
The medication will give her a “peaceful and painless” ending to her life. However, Brittany said this is not a suicide.
“There is not a cell in my body that is suicidal or that wants to die,” Maynard told People.com. “I want to live. I wish there was a cure for my disease but there’s not. … Being able to choose to go with dignity is less terrifying.”
Maynard’s family moved with her to Oregon earlier this year so she would have access to Oregon’s “Death with Dignity Act,” which has allowed over 750 people to die using medication since 1997.
Life-rights advocacy organization Compassion & Choices and The Brittany Maynard Fund will provide Brittany a platform to share her story and bring attention to the end-of-life rights.
According to Compassion & Choices, Brittany will spend her last days fighting for others’ rights to end their lives.
oh, she’s the ideal poster child for this. Very young, pretty, newly married to handsome husband. And an incurable disease. Who better to promote the “right to die?” These people know exactly what they are doing.
After her death her husband/mother/best friend/doctor, etc. will go on the speakers circuit talking about the dignity of taking your own life. You can bet on it. “Right to die” will get on ballots across the country and in 2 decades or less, it will be available in at least 40 of the 50 states. Even if it fails, there will be judges to overturn the vote. I’ve seen this movie already.
A friend of mine died from this cancer...it was not at all pleasant and her husband and family suffered greatly before she passed.
A terrible way to die.
I am praying for this woman and her family...
Natural death (with palliative care)at least gives her the chance of some degree of unexpected, perhaps partial, perhaps temporary, recovery; which does happen often enough that it's not insignificant. Natural death also gives you the chance to live out your full allotted time, with all the prayers, insights, joys, sufferings, dread, surprises and priceless changes of perspective that might entail. (And competent palliative care can eliminate pain and most discomfort in terminal cases.)
Natural death shows fidelity to God, Who is apparently not part of her consideration, but He should be. He created her for His purposes, and He is Lord of her life and death. Without His purposes, her life is ultimately absurd, as well as her death. For what? For nullity. For vacuity. For extinction.
She owes Him to determine her death, since she owes Him her life (whether she realizes it or not.) He is betrayed and grieved by self-slaughter and her underlying rejection of transcendant meaning.
Mindfulness of one's natural death can truly open up a season of wisdom and a not-to-be-rejected gift: the time before death is uniquely graced for reconciliation with God and with all your fellow creatures.
Fortitude in dying is also a chance to manifest courage to the people around you. It serves to protect the rest of the human community from the temptation of suicide, especially for the young, fragile and vulnerable who might be tempted to follow your example. Suicide does not secure your dignity. It secures your nullity.
Suicide says, "Faced with all posibilities, surveying all conceivable permutations and combinations, considering all the algorithms in the universe. I choose zero. In fact, I choose to divide it all by zero, and render it all absurd."
SuicideIt robs society of its strong protective default position for the preservation of life, and it weakens everybody else's safety and dignity. Suicide countenanced by politics, law and medicine corrupts the political, legal and medical professions.
Therefore if you're so Invictus-themed autonomous and you've got a yen for suicide, be a little self-respecting and do it YOURSELF. Don't drag in the law and the doctors and the pathetic fiancé. Do the research, google suicide, and just do it.
I do hope she changes her mind before her designated deathdate. I hope, like Scheherazade, she finds 1,001 reasons to cheat death for one more day.
This message is not for her, poor girl: she'll never seeit. It is meant for all those who are reading these lines.
Spot on.
So, are you in favor of medical intervention to save the life of a person who would die without it? After all, maybe it was God’s plan that they should die of that particular condition or disease; and why should man work to changethat outcome?
This is a difficult case, and you should not be so quick to judge.
At what point is it OK for a person with ALS to decide to decline further medical intervention when their death is certain within a few weeks or months?
Is there something about “slow and painful” you don’t understand?
A good question, SeaHawkFan, and I hope I can give an adequate answer, or at last the beginnings of one.
One angle to get at, is question of, What is the proper end, or goal, of the the medical profession? The proper answer, which might be gathered from Hippocrates or Galen or Aquinas, is that medicine is about restoring health; at any rate, to bring a person back to normal well-being. It is to heal the injury, to restore the lost or weakened function, to cure the illness, to empower well-functioning and remedy non-functioning, to advance life rather than death: because nobody was ever healthier dead.
This marks off the legitimate medical arts from sorcery, from pharmakeia in the malign sense of witch-doctorism or black magic: because sorcery could be employed for well or ill, to cause fertility or stillbirth, to imbue sanity or madness, to support a man's reasoning power or destroy it; to restore or to maim, to advance a true therapeutic recovery or a drugged death.
The techniques of legitimate medicine may be various (diet, rest, exercise, hygiene, drugs, devices, surgery) but the aim is unitary: a sound mind in a sound body, a whole functioning person, complete in every detail.
This is God's will, God being good; so it is not a matter of impiety to practice healing. Jesus healed everywhere he went; so did is Apostles; St. Luke the Evangelist was called by St. Paul "the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14). No conflict here.
The conflict comes when people start misusing the healing arts and turning them, once again, into a perverted pharmakeia aiming not at health, but at the will, which in a socialist medical regime means the aims of the Powers That Be, and in a capitalist one means those of the highest bidder. Either one, ruled by political power or by financial demand, lacks ethics: it is simply an amoral manipulation of bodies and minds for ends which are not intrinsic to human health.
How I admire Hippocrates!
Sen in this light, killing a paient is always wrong, because --- as I said -- no one is healthier dead.
I rest my case. For now.
This means everyone, no matter what the prognosis, should get ordinary care in the form of nutrition and hydration, adequate clothing or covering, cleanliness, pain management, cleanliness, comfort-care, and the encouraging presence of others: companionship to the borders of this life, and the beginning of the next.
No.
I always thought the greatest tenet of the Hippocratic Oath was “to do no harm”.
This woman is making her own choice; she is not being refused treatment by the medical profession. There are many people, especially the elderly with terminal medical conditions who make the very rational decision to end treatment because further treatment would only slightly delay death while imposing enormous pain and suffering.
This might even be more so for Christians who know they are going to heaven.
I am not saying that this woman is making the most Christian or best ethical decision. It’s not an easy case. I may not even agree that she is making the correct decision; just that I am not going to be judgmental in this situation assuming it is being accurately reported.
The only thing that really bothers me is the attention-whore quality.
She has a devastating diagnosis, many do. She has decided to suicide with fanfare, many die quietly to make it easier on family and friends.
Was at a gathering a few months ago. It was subdued and odd. Did not know it but one of the people there had a terminal dx and had just let everyone know that he was planning to suicide within the month. The people were somewhat paralyzed and sad. There was an attention-whore quality there too.
He did suicide and the sob did it in such a way that his teen sons found him. Selfish slob.
I certainly agree with your observation. It could be that the organization has pressured her and her family into making it a spectacle.
I also see that in 25 years, 750 people died using this option. That's just 30 per year. Not trying to minimize it, but it also leads me to think that many, many terminal patients, their families, and doctors find a way to "speed up the process" through the discreet use of pain medications.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.