Dead Ends by Paul Willcocks

Author:Paul Willcocks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

WHOSE BODY IS THIS?

Sue Rodriguez walked out of the doctor’s office in August 1991 and knew everything in her life had changed.

She was forty-one, mother of a son just starting school. She had begun working as a legal secretary, was happily married, and had a home in the pastoral Saanich Peninsula outside Victoria.

And, Rodriguez had just learned, she was dying.

She had noticed numbness and weakness in her left hand in April, and been to several doctors seeking answers.

Now she knew. She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Rodriguez could expect to live two to three years after the onset of the disease—the time she first noticed the numbness in her hand.

As ALS progressed, nerve cells in her brain and spinal cord would die. They control all the muscles in the body. As the cells died, her muscles would weaken and atrophy.

People with ALS lose the ability to walk, or use their arms. The muscles of the head and neck waste away, so they can’t speak, chew, or swallow. They must be fed, first by someone else, then, as swallowing becomes impossible, through a tube. They are at risk of respiratory infections and choking.

As their conditions worsen, people are likely to be paralyzed, unable to lift their heads. Machines keep them breathing through tubes. Caregivers, family or paid, empty catheters and clean bowel movements and try to prevent bedsores.

Death usually comes because patients choke to death on food, develop pneumonia, or suffocate when their muscles used in breathing no longer work.

And through it all, patients’ brains are otherwise unaffected—they feel pain, are aware of their circumstances. The mind is a prisoner in a wasting body.

Rodriguez knew that was not for her.

She researched the disease, decided she would not die that way.

“I’m not afraid of death at all,” Rodriguez told Anne Mullins of the Vancouver Sun. “But I fear gasping for breath, panicking, being in a situation where I am hooked up to a respirator, unable to swallow, unable to move, unable to do anything for myself.”

“I hate to be entertaining the thought, but I will do what I have to do in order to die in as peaceful a manner as possible.”

The law, Rodriguez found, made dying peacefully, on her terms, extremely difficult. Suicide is legal in Canada. But helping someone else commit suicide is a criminal offence.

Rodriguez wanted as much time with her husband and young son as possible. By the time she decided to end her life, she would likely be physically unable to make it happen. She would need help.

She knew she couldn’t ask her husband to help end her life when the time came. It would be too difficult emotionally. And he would be breaking the law. If he went to jail, who would care for their son?

So Rodriguez decided to do everything she could to change the law. If not in time for her, then for others.

It was a brave choice. Polls indicated most Canadians supported an individual’s right to choose the time of his or her death and to be assisted by a doctor.

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