While aid-in-dying, or “death with dignity,” is now legal in seven states and Washington, D.C., medically assisted suicide retains tough opposition. “At least she got into that coma state versus four to eight weeks of torture,” Freeman said. She died within a week, not the one or two months her doctors had predicted before the sedation. Once they calibrated the dosage properly, she never woke up again. The medical staff at the Long Beach acute care center where Martin was a patient gave her phenobarbital. The goal is to reduce or eliminate suffering, but in many cases the patient dies without regaining consciousness. Under palliative sedation, a doctor gives a terminally ill patient enough sedatives to induce unconsciousness.
But Martin did have one alternative to the agonizing death she feared: palliative sedation. Freeman couldn’t bring herself to do it, fearing the legal consequences and the possibility that her sister would survive and end up in even worse shape.Ĭalifornia’s aid-in-dying law, authorizing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to certain terminally ill patients, was still two years from going into effect in 2016.
Martin fantasized about having her sister drive her into the mountains and leave her with the liquid morphine drops she had surreptitiously collected over three months - medicine that didn’t relieve her pain but might be enough to kill her if she took it all at once. Sometimes, she would flee into the California night in her bedclothes, “as if she were trying to outrun the pain,” her older sister Anita Freeman recalled.
A woman who had been generous and good-humored turned into someone hardly recognizable to her loving family: paranoid, snarling, violent. Toward the end, the pain had practically driven Elizabeth Martin mad.īy then, the cancer had spread everywhere, from her colon to her spine, her liver, her adrenal glands and one of her lungs.
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