The American Medical Student Association position reads: “We support aid in dying as a way to allow competent patients with terminal diseases to decide how to live the last moments of their lives. When all other approaches to relive the suffering of a terminal illness have failed…assisted death is an extension of compassionate medical care.”

A January 2012 QMark Poll found that 77 percent of Hawaii adults and 76 percent of Hawaii doctors support access to aid in dying. The survey showed overwhelming majorities believe self-determination at the end of life is their right, and they favor allowing mentally competent adults dying of a terminal illness to ask their doctors to prescribe medication that gives them peace of mind as they approach death.

Opponents like Flanders consistently make false arguments about aid in dying. They deliberately use the intimidating and inaccurate word “suicide” to imply that legal aid in dying would somehow cause the deaths of healthy people. In reality aid in dying applies only to people whose deaths are already imminent.

Opponents of aid in dying claim that it would allow doctors to “kill” people. In fact it allows only those already dying to request a prescription. This then supports the patient’s autonomy. They have control of their life and can, if they choose, self-administer medication to initiate their deaths should they feel their suffering has become unbearable.

The Hawaii Medical Association does not represent all the doctors in the state. It is grossly contradictory that Flanders can support allowing doctors to (1) provide palliative support to voluntarily stop nutrition and hydration, (2) withdraw a ventilator or other life-sustaining treatment, or (3) provide palliative sedation even to the point of unconsciousness—but he would deny terminal patients the choice to ask their doctors for medications to self-administer for a peaceful and certain death if suffering became unbearable. A physician who has followed and cared for a patient, sometimes for many years, should be the one to care, advise—and yes, assist—that patient in their choice of how to end their life.

Thankfully, experts on Hawaii law, medicine, elder care, legislative and end-of-life issues have concluded Hawaii physicians may already provide aid in dying subject to professional best practice standards—and they are doing so now. Organizations like Compassion & Choices Hawaii, for which I serve as a medical advisor, offer free advice and services on all aspects of end of life choice, including aid-in-dying (http://www.compassionandchoices.org/hawaii or 808-225-4563).

“Terminally ill people get peace of mind from knowing they can request medication that will allow them to achieve a peaceful death,” Mary Steiner, campaign manager for Compassion & Choices Hawaii, said in a statement. “Some people get a prescription and don’t take the medication for weeks or months. They go on living their life.”

Steiner dismissed arguments from opponents of aid in dying that patients would use the medication prematurely.

“The report shows just the opposite, as we have seen in other states where the option is available,” she said. “Patients frequently say that the peace of mind and control they gain makes it easier to live out their remaining days.”

Growing Trend

As Civil Beat has reported, the aid-in-dying movement is gradually being accepted in a handful of other states, though it has faced obstacles from pro-life groups who favor palliative care rather than sanctioning a form of doctor-assisted suicide.

Locally, Death With Dignity legislation has been rejected several times by the Hawaii Legislature, with religious organizations leading the opposition.

What’s different about aid in dying is that supporters believe government does not have to enact new laws in order to allow people to end their own lives.

A spokesperson for Compassion & Choices Hawaii said he knew of no legal disputes regarding the seven patients who consulted with PACAID, describing all of them as “mentally competent adults making their own decisions.”

Compassion & Choices Hawaii said a year ago that an analysis of Hawaii law and policy “revealed a climate supportive of the option of aid in dying.”

The group said the new Hawaii data is consistent with data from Oregon, where “one in six terminally ill Oregonians talks with their family about aid in dying. One in 50 talks with their doctor. In the end, one in 500 ingests life-ending medication.”

Elevated Profile

In a related development, on Tuesday Compassion & Choices Hawaii said it wanted to participate as a “friend of the court” in a legal case involving a Queen’s Medical Center patient reported to have expressed an advanced directive regarding her life.

Karen Okada, 95, had given directions in 1998 to her brother that her life not be artificially prolonged, according to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser report last month. The newspaper said Okada “now is living a semi-comatose state at Queen’s Medical Center with a feeding tube.”

Compassion & Choices Hawaii wants Okada’s directive honored, and the group’s director of legal affairs, Kathryn Tucker, said appointing Okada’s brother as her agent does not mean he can ignore her instructions.

“Law in Hawaii is clear on this point,” said Kathryn Tucker, legal affairs director for the group. “The statute requires that: ‘An agent shall make a healthcare decision in accordance with the principal’s individual instructions.’”   The matter is pending in 1st Circuit Court, with a hearing set for Oct. 11.

September 19, 2012

 

I was standing in my cubicle, a 24-year-old fact-checker envisioning a publishing career of glamor and greatness, suddenly shaking as I read the document my mother had mailed. It detailed her wish that I promise never to keep her or my father alive with artificial respirators, IV-drip nourishment, or anything else she deemed “extreme.”

I was horrified, and slightly angry. My mom was a 54-year-old literature professor who’d spent the 1970s eating whole grains and downing vitamins. She was healthier than anyone I knew. Why get so dramatic now? It seemed ghoulish, not to mention premature. But I scrawled my signature at the bottom of the page and shoved it into an envelope, my mother’s voice in my head, prodding me along.

As with the whole wheat and vitamins, my mother—back in 1990—was onto something long before it became conventional wisdom. But these days, Americans’ approach to aging and death is rapidly evolving, pushed both by the numbers and the grim reality behind them: In 40 years, there will be 19 million Americans over 85, all at high risk of losing the ability to care for themselves or dwindling away due to organ failure, dementia, or chronic illness. (The days of a sudden fatal heart attack are fading; by 2008, the death rate from coronary heart disease was down 72 percent from what it was in 1950.)

So while many seniors now live vigorous lives well into their 80s, no one gets a free pass. Eating right and exercising may merely forestall an inevitable and ruinously expensive decline. By 2050, the cost of dementia care alone is projected to total more than $1 trillion.

My mom’s decision to face her end came not from any of these facts, but from the nightmare of watching her own mother’s angry decline in a New York nursing home. “You’re all a bunch of rotten apples,” Grandma growled at visitors, the words erupting from her otherwise mute lips. And there she sat for three years, waiting to die. “Why can’t you just get me some pills so I can go?” she would sometimes wail.

The slide toward death was only slightly less awful for my father’s mother. Grandma Ada would greet me with a dazed smile—though it was impossible to know if she recognized the person standing in front of her wheelchair—before thrashing with involuntary spasms. An aide would come to restrain her, and then my dad and I would leave.

This cannot be right. This cannot be what we want for our parents—or ourselves.

In Denial

Despite our myriad technological advances, the final stages of life in America still exist as a twilight purgatory where too many people simply suffer and wait, having lost all power to have any effect on the world or their place in it. No wonder we’re loathe to confront this. The Patient Self-Determination Act, passed in 1990, guarantees us the right to take some control over our final days by creating advance directives like the one my mother made me sign, yet fewer than 50 percent of patients have done so. This amazes me.

“We have a death taboo in our country,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, whose advocacy group, Compassion & Choices, pushed Washington and Oregon to pass laws allowing doctors to prescribe life-ending medication for the terminally ill. “Americans act as if death is optional. It’s all tied into a romance with technology, against accepting ourselves as mortal.”

For proof of this, consider that among venture capitalists the cutting edge is no longer computers, but life-extending technologies. Peter Thiel, the 45-year-old who started PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, has thrown in with a $3.5 million bet on the famed anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey. And Thiel is no outlier. As of 2010, about 400 companies were working to reverse human aging.

Talking About Death

The reason for this chronic avoidance of aging and death is not simply that American culture equals youth culture. It’s that we grow up trained to believe in self-determination—which is precisely what’s lost with our current approach to the process of dying. But what if every time you saw your doctor for a checkup there were a few basic questions to answer about your wishes for the end of life? What if planning for those days became customary—a discussion of personal preferences—instead of paralyzing?

Dr. Peter Saul, a physician in Australia, endeavored to test this approach by interviewing hundreds of dying patients at Newcastle Hospital in Melbourne about the way they’d like to handle their lead-up to death—and how they felt discussing it. He was startled to find that 98 percent said they loved being asked. They appreciated the chance to think out loud on the subject. They thought it should be standard practice.

“Most people don’t want to be dead, but I think most people want to have some control over how their dying process proceeds,” Saul says in his widely viewed TED lecture “Let’s Talk About Dying.”

Nevertheless, when his study was complete, Newcastle went back to business as usual, studiously ignoring the elephant in the room, acting as if these patients would eventually stand up and walk out, whistling. “The cultural issue had reasserted itself,” Saul says drily.

Slow Medicine

It’s hardly surprising that medical personnel would drive this reexamination of our final days. Coombs Lee, who spent 25 years as a nurse and physician’s assistant, considers her current advocacy work a form of atonement for the misery she visited on terminal patients in the past—forcing IV tubes into collapsed veins, cracking ribs open for heart resuscitation.

“I had one elderly patient who I resuscitated in the I.C.U., and he was livid,” she says. “He shook his fist at me, ‘Barbara, don’t you ever do that again!’ We made a deal that the next time it happened we would just keep him comfortable and let him go, and that’s what we did.”

It bears pointing out, however, that many doctors dislike discussing the ultimate question—whether patients should be allowed to choose their moment of death by legally obtaining life-ending medication. Several have told me that the debate over this overshadows more important conversations about how to give meaning to what remains of life. In Europe, the term of art is euthanasia—the practice of injecting patients with life-ending drugs—which remains illegal in the United States. But whatever the method, many physicians would prefer to avoid the entire topic.

“I don’t think euthanasia matters,” says Saul. “I think it’s a sideshow.”

While arguments flare around this, Dennis McCullough, a geriatrician in New Hampshire, has noticed a quieter answer taking shape among his own patients. Many are themselves retired doctors and nurses, and they have taken charge of their last days by carefully mulling the realities of aggressive medical intervention. Rather than grasping at every possible procedure to stave off the inevitable, they focus instead on accepting it. In place of scheduling never-ending doctor’s visits, they concentrate on connecting with others.

McCullough has termed their philosophy “slow medicine,” and his book about it, My Mother, Your Mother, is starting to attract attention around the world.

“If you go to a doctor to get a recommendation for having some procedure, that’s probably what’s going to happen. Doctors are driven by revenue,” he said in an interview. “But many of the things that we can do to older people don’t yield the results we’ve promised—medicine can’t fix everything. ‘Slow medicine’ is being more thoughtful about that and staying away from decisions based on fear.”

This attitude is gaining traction. In November, several hundred physicians plan to gather in Italy to discuss slow medicine (a name lifted from the similarly anti-tech slow food movement), and McCullough’s book is being translated into Korean and Japanese.

“What’s the last gift you’re going to give your family? In a sense, it’s knowing how to die,” he says. “Staying alive is not necessarily the goal.”

Death With Dignity

I consider my mother-in-law, a practicing Catholic and right-leaning political moderate, a barometer for this slowly shifting national consciousness. She is in her mid-60s and healthy, but has already written directives specifying that Bach be played at her bedside and perfume scent the air, if her health deteriorates to the point where she cannot say so herself.

Personally, I’m relieved. Unlike my 24-year-old self, I now find it comforting to plan these things, rather than living in fear of them. But I would still be mired in denial were it not for former Washington Governor Booth Gardner, whom I wrote about in 2008 when he was pushing for a Death with Dignity law and I was a newspaper reporter.

Shaking with Parkinson’s disease, he tried to spark conversation about legalizing physician-assisted aid-in-dying while attending a luncheon in downtown Seattle with a small circle of business friends: “I have a real tough time understanding why people like us, who’ve made tough decisions all their lives—buying, selling, hiring—do not have the right to make such a fundamental decision as this,” Gardner said, referencing his wish to take life-ending medication when his illness becomes unbearable, to gather his family and die when he chooses.

The men sipped their soup. They did not approve. They did not even want to discuss it. Yet that stony opposition—which mirrors the position of the Catholic church, groups representing the disabled, and hospice workers dedicated to maintaining “studied neutrality”—has, ironically, begun to nudge talk of death into the open.

Gardner, to my mind, had articulated the central concern: Wherever you come down on end-of-life decisions, the question is one of control—and who is going to have it over our bodies at the last moments.

Thus far, only Washington and Oregon have passed Death with Dignity laws, though there is a voter initiative scheduled for the November election in Massachusetts. In Montana, the courts have ruled that physicians who prescribe life-ending medication for the terminally ill are not subject to homicide statutes; in New Mexico, two doctors have filed a suit challenging prohibitions against “assisting suicide.” And in Hawaii, four doctors willing to prescribe life-ending medication have geared up for a similar fight.

Yet after 15 years of legalized aid-in-dying in Oregon, the biggest news is how seldom people actually invoke this right. Since 1997, fewer than 600 terminal patients have swallowed doctor-prescribed drugs hastening their ends, though 935 had prescriptions written. Did 335 people change their minds at the last minute? Decide in their final days to cling to life as long as possible?

If so, that might be the best thing to come out of Compassion & Choices’ campaign: a peace of mind that allows us to soldier on, knowing we can control the manner of our death, even if we never choose to exercise that power.

My own immediate family ranges in age from 3 to 84, and I envision a dinner in the not-too-distant future when we will gather, talk about how to make my parents’ final journey as meaningful as all that has come before, and raise a glass to the next stage. Maybe at Thanksgiving.