Good Medicine by Philip Hebert

Author:Philip Hebert [Hebert, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-68326-5
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2016-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

VI

THE QUALITY OF OUR MERCY

Not long after arriving in Canada from Iran in 2010, fifty-eight-year-old Hassan Rasouli began to complain to his wife of hearing loss. Several months later, doctors found a small benign tumour in his brain, behind his right ear. His wife, Parichehr Salasel, was worried, but not Hassan. He never worried about such things. He let Parichehr do his worrying for him. Hassan just wanted the problem fixed.1

Parichehr, Hassan, and their two children had left an increasingly religious Iran to secure the futures of their son and daughter. Hassan and Parichehr, each in their fifties when they left Iran, were well educated; he was an engineer and she had been a primary care doctor.

When Hassan’s tumour was discovered, he was referred to a neurosurgeon in Toronto, where he and Parichehr lived. Hassan and his wife considered the surgeon to be suitably confident. “In two days, three days at most, he’ll be home,” the surgeon told them. “The operation Hassan needs is not a big problem, believe me.”

They did believe him, and they agreed to let the surgeon operate on Hassan’s brain. A surgical consent form was obtained and the necessary paperwork completed. It seemed like a rather routine procedure, hardly risky at all. Indeed, the operation went well, and the tumour was removed.

But almost exactly three years later, in October 2013, Hassan and his family were at the centre of a case before the Supreme Court of Canada, fighting to keep Hassan on life support against the opinion of his doctors in that same hospital. Although the case would be decided upon a statutory interpretation of Ontario’s Health Care Consent Act, within public discourse it would raise questions about who should have the ultimate say in end-of-life decisions. As Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the majority judgment in favour of Hassan’s family, “This case presents us with a tragic yet increasingly common conflict. A patient is unconscious. He is on life support—support that may keep him alive for a very long time, given the resources of modern medicine. His physicians, who see no prospect of recovery and only a long progression of complications as his body deteriorates, wish to withdraw life support. His wife, believing that he would wish to be kept alive, opposes withdrawal of life support. How should the impasse be resolved?”2

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.

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