The message was loud and clear: “I can help you die …”

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“I was asked ‘if I understood the gravity of my condition.’ Yes, I said, I am well aware of the implications.”

Bill Peace’s story is told in full elsewhere, an essay about the severe wound he had in 2010 and in particular one experience he had late one night, an event that he says has “haunted him”. Here are some excerpts:

The doctor, wrote Peace, “grimly told me I would be bedbound for at least six months and most likely a year or more. That there was a good chance the wound would never heal. If this happened, I would never sit in my wheelchair. I would never be able to work again. Not close to done, he told me I was looking at a life of complete and utter dependence. My medical expenses would be staggering. Bankruptcy was not just possible but likely. Insurance would stop covering wound care well before I was healed. Most people with the type of wound I had ended up in a nursing home.

“This litany of disaster is all too familiar to me and others with a disability. The scenario laid out happens with shocking regularity to paralyzed people.

“The hospitalist went on to tell me I was on powerful antibiotics that could cause significant organ damage. My kidneys or liver could fail at any time. He wanted me to know that MRSA was a life-threatening infection particularly because my wound was open, deep, and grossly infected. Many paralyzed people die from such a wound.

“His next words were unforgettable. The choice to receive antibiotics was my decision and mine alone. He informed me I had the right to forego any medication, including the lifesaving antibiotics.

“If I chose not to continue with the current therapy, I could be made very comfortable. I would feel no pain or discomfort at all. Although not explicitly stated, the message was loud and clear: I can help you die peacefully. Clearly death was preferable to nursing home care, unemployment, bankruptcy, and a lifetime in bed.

“I am not sure exactly what I said or how I said it, but I was emphatic—I wanted to continue treatment, including the antibiotics. I wanted to live.

“I never told anyone about what transpired. Not my family, friends, the nurses I saw for over a year when I was bedbound. I did not tell anyone for a very good reason: I was scared. Terrified really. A physician, a person who is highly educated, and I would hope free of any bias, considered my life not worth living. Disability was a fate worse than death. It was the ultimate insult.

“People with a disability do not write about fear, we feel it I am sure, but few delve into how deadly cultural assumptions can be.”

Continue reading Comfort Care: Killing a Bad Cripple.

RELEASE: Disability Rights Group Challenges Language for Assisted Suicide Ballot Measure as “Misleading, Inaccurate, and Euphemistic”

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Disability Rights Group Challenges Language for Assisted Suicide Ballot Measure as “Misleading, Inaccurate, and Euphemistic”

John Kelly, Director of Second Thoughts, 
disability activists opposed to legalizing assisted suicide

Boston, Massachusetts (PRWEB) May 18, 2012 
On Thursday, May 17, 2012, over 60 Massachusetts voters including members of the disability rights group Second Thoughts filed a challenge before the Supreme Judicial Court (Case No. SJ 2012 0216) regarding the proposed ballot language for the measure that, if approved, would legalize assisted suicide in the state.
“The ballot language is clearly misleading,” said Second Thoughts director John Kelly of Boston. “We want the voters of Massachusetts to know exactly what they are voting on this November,” he said.
The petition asks the Supreme Judicial Court to remand the language to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Secretary of State William Galvin with the requirement that they amend the language for clarity and accuracy.
“The ballot language repeats the problems of the bill itself,” said Second Thoughts member Paul Spooner of Taunton. “The title is euphemistic, with the word ‘medication’ twisted beyond recognition. People will be led to believe that the measure is about palliative care, when it is about taking a lethal overdose — in other words, poison. Why not just call the act by its common and legal name, ‘physician-assisted suicide?'”
“The way ‘terminally-ill’ is used in the description is clearly misleading,” said Kelly, “people will be encouraged to assume that being ‘terminally ill’ is a biological fact, rather than a human guess.”
“People with disabilities are very familiar with so-called terminal diagnoses,” said Second Thoughts member John Norton of Florence. “Everyone knows someone who has outlived their terminal diagnosis — I was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease as a teenager; I’m alive and well fifty years later. The ballot language misleads by implying that a ‘terminally-ill’ diagnosis actually leads to death within six months. Instead, it should say ‘diagnosed as terminal’ or something similar in terms of accuracy.”
“And what about choice,” asked Spooner. “There are no safeguards to protect patients from having the poison given to them by an heir or abusive caretaker. No witnesses are required under the law, so if someone else were to administer the drugs, who would know?”
The language submitted by the Attorney General Martha Coakley and Secretary of State is:
Title: Prescribing Medication to End Life [11-12] – Petition G
A YES VOTE would enact the proposed law allowing a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at the request of a terminally-ill patient meeting certain conditions, to end that person’s life. (Massachusetts Register, page 3.)
Second Thoughts has taken a leading role in opposing the ballot measure, and has been featured in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and on local TV and radio.
For full features of release, go to: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/5/prweb9517524.htm
 

Minnesota: Grand Jury Issues 17-Count Indictment Against 4 Final Exit Network Members

assisted suicide, crime and punishment, final exit network, indictments, Jerry Dincin, lawrence egbert, Minnesota, Our News & Commentary Blog, reality check

From the Baltimore Sun:

HASTINGS, Minn. — A Minnesota grand jury has indicted a national right-to-die group and several members for their actions in the 2007 suicide of a suburban Minneapolis woman, prosecutors announced Monday.

The 17-count indictment charges the medical director of Final Exit Network, Lawrence Egbert of Baltimore, and three other officials with felony counts of assisting suicide and interference with a death scene, a gross misdemeanor. It also charged the New Jersey-based group in its corporate capacity.

“This investigation and prosecution is not a politically motivated attack on the right-to-die movement,” Dakota County prosecutor James Backstrom said at a news conference. “Rather, it is an effort to bring to justice a corporation and several of its officers and volunteers who we are alleging advised, encouraged or assisted Doreen Dunn in the taking of her own life on May 30, 2007, in violation of Minnesota law.”

Here’s a breakdown of the Final Exit Network (FEN) members and their alleged roles in Doreen Dunn’s death:

The indictment names Egbert, 84; Jerry Dincin, 81, of Highland Park, Ill.; Roberta Massey, 66, of Bear, Del.; and Thomas Goodwin, 65, of Punta Gorda, Fla. Backstrom said Egbert and Dincin traveled to Minnesota to be with Dunn on the day she died, and that they likely dumped the equipment she used to kill herself in a trash bin on their way back to the airport.

The fact that Egbert was allegedly one of the ‘exit guides’ may bring some new heat and light in this (now) criminal case.  As I mentioned last week,  Larry Egbert was the subject of an extensive (if not terribly probing) interview published in the Washington Post last January.  In the interview, he shared the fact that he ‘re-used’ so-callled ‘exit bags,’ providing them to ‘clients’ so they wouldn’t have to purchase them.  He showed the reporter a large number of them stashed in a closet in his home.

It’s essential, IMO, that the prosecutor bring this up at trial.  If contrary to claims repeated even now in the current story that FEN ‘doesn’t provide’ the means to commit suicide, Egbert provided the ‘Exit Bag,’ that is actual material assistance.  Further, it could implicate Dincin, since it would be hard to hide the fact that Dunn was using a used ‘exit bag’ that Egbert brought, rather than one she purchased herself.  That would also mean that the organization has been knowingly misrepresenting itself and its practices.

Is that shocking?  Not really.  When you have a bunch of vigilantes whose primary mission is to facilitate the suicides of total strangers, there really can’t be any breach of integrity that’s really surprising.  –Stephen Drake

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I thought it would be helpful to start off this entry with a little personal background information.  As I’ve mentioned before, my disabilities are pretty certainly a result of brain injury at birth, accompanied by the development of hydrocephalus.  I was in what they refer to as the “first generation” of shunt recipients for the condition (a shunt is a tube inserted through the brain into the ventricles with the other end draining into the chest or abdomen).

Many of us share similar cognitive strengths and weaknesses.  Short version is language areas good, spatial areas not so good.  Nevertheless, once you’ve been identified with a pathology, there’s a tendency for some professionals to view some behaviors that might be seen as precocious in most children as dysfunctional in children already identified as ‘damaged.’

For example, when a precocious child uses vocabulary advanced for their age, he or she might not have full comprehension of the full meaning of the word he or she is using.  When we see a precocious kid, we cut him or her slack for learning such words at all, and don’t wonder that their life experiences haven’t caught up so that full comprehension of their meaning is there.

Well, a lot of us kids with hydrocephalus turned out to be early talkers, and pretty good at amassing a large vocabulary unusual for our age.  Professionals came up with a term to describe what they saw – ‘Cocktail Party Speech’ which is succinctly defined in this course material for a Speech/Language class:

Many hydrocephalic children have been characterized as hyperverbal with “cocktail party speech.” Cocktail party speech is an example of well developed form (well-developed articulation, intonation, and stress patterns) that is used for social interactions but has weak conceptual meaning.

It’s that second sentence that I think is relevant to the term I want to discuss.  The phenomenon here

Minnesota: Dakota Grand Jury Convening This Week to Consider Charges Against Members of Final Exit Network

assisted suicide, courts, final exit network, grand jury, Jerry Dincin, lawrence egbert, Minnesota, reality check

Right now, this latest story involving the Final Exit Network (FEN) is getting only local coverage, but it could become a national story, depending on the outcome.

From the story, by reporter Laura Adelmann:

Apple Valley woman may have killed herself using information from Final Exit Network

In a March 26 letter to a defense attorney, Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom’s office stated it will convene a grand jury May 9-11 seeking an indictment to prosecute right-to-die advocates for their role in an Apple Valley woman’s May 30, 2007 suicide.


Doreen Nan (Gunderson) Dunn, then 57, suffered years of intense chronic pain and depression when she killed herself using a hood and helium gas, according to Robert Rivas, attorney for the Final Exit Network, a national nonprofit organization accused of assisting suicides and named in the investigation.

Before taking her life, Dunn had paid a $50 membership fee to Final Exit Network, according to a March 20 search warrant issued by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation detailing evidence forwarded to the Dakota County Attorney’s Office and obtained by Sun Thisweek.

The warrant cites phone records, documents, airline tickets and car rental contracts as evidence Dunn had contact with some Final Exit members months before taking her life and on the day she died.

Final Exit members named in the investigation are Thomas “Ted” Goodwin, former president of Final Exit Network; Roberta Massey, a Final Exit “case coordinator;” Jerry Dincin, then-Final Exit Network president; and Dr. Lawrence Egbert, Final Exit medical director who Newsweek dubbed “The New Doctor Death.”

Charges the grand jury will be asked to consider are aiding suicide, conspiracy to commit the crime of aiding suicide and interference with a dead body, according to the search warrant.

Those names should look familiar.  Goodwin and Egbert were both involved in the suicide of John Celmer, a man in Georgia who committed suicide after successful cancer treatment left him distressed about his appearance after surgery.  Massey and Egbert were defendants in the case involving Jana Van Voorhis, a woman with no serious physical problems but who had a long history of emotional and psychological issues.

The reporter is pretty careful in most cases in this story to qualify statements about FEN practices with wording such as “the website states.”

That’s important because not all of what the FEN website claims is true. Take this, for example, from the latest article:

A Final Exit Medical Committee reviews information, and if approved, an “Exit Guide” is assigned who provides detailed information how a person may purchase equipment and take steps to end their own life, according to the website.

“The Network never supplies equipment,” the website states.

That right there – about FEN never supplying equipment.  It’s not true.  How do we know?  The overly-modest and zealous Dr. Larry Egbert told us so, in an interview that appeared in the Washington Post in January:

Egbert tells me that years ago he asked someone who was about to “exit” if he could reuse the hood to save future patients the cost of buying a new one. The patient was delighted with the idea, Egbert says. He started asking everyone.

The hood in my bare hands feels slightly slick. So, this one, the one I’m holding, has been used to end someone’s life? I ask. Egbert tells me it has surely been used at least once, and maybe several times, and the same could be said for most of the other 17 hoods in the garbage bag. 

So, Egbert, by his own admission, has provided equipment on a regular basis in his work as an ‘exit guide.’  That might seem like a minor point to some in and of itself, but the fact is, there is no way for us – the public – to verify any claim FEN makes.  It’s only when someone like Egbert gets to talking and bragging we get to hear some facts that depart from the established script.

We don’t know who else has supplied equipment to ‘clients.’  We don’t know how many FEN members ‘pushed’ so-called ‘clients’ with second thoughts to get on with it, not wanting their valuable times wasted.  We don’t know how if any of the FEN members have held down the hands of a person trying desperately to tear the bag off.

We don’t know.  And even Robert Rivas (FEN atty.) and Jerry Dincin cannot swear that they know the parameters of what has gone on in each and every so-called ‘peaceful exit.’  They weren’t there and they don’t know.  When they try to tell us that everyone is behaving responsibly, remind them that Egbert already revealed one lie about their practices and we’re not inclined to believe any other unverified claims they make.  –Stephen Drake