Editor’s Note: Brittany Maynard labored as a volunteer advocate for the nation’s main end-of-life selection group, Compassion and Choices. She lived in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, Dan Diaz, and mom, Debbie Ziegler. Watch Brittany and her household inform her story at www.thebrittanyfund.org. The opinions expressed on this commentary are solely these of the writer.
Story highlights
Married for a 12 months, Brittany Maynard, 29, discovered she had aggressive mind most cancers
She had six months to dwell, and she or he did not need her household to watch her dying in ache
Maynard and her household moved to Oregon to make the most of the Death with Dignity legislation
She says no person has the right to take away the choice from somebody who’s terminally ailing
NCS
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On New Year’s Day, after months of affected by debilitating complications, I discovered that I had mind most cancers.
I used to be 29 years outdated. I’d been married for simply over a 12 months. My husband and I had been attempting for a household.
Our lives devolved into hospital stays, physician consultations and medical analysis. Nine days after my preliminary diagnoses, I had a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of my temporal lobe. Both surgical procedures had been an effort to cease the expansion of my tumor.
In April, I discovered that not solely had my tumor come again, nevertheless it was extra aggressive. Doctors gave me a prognosis of six months to dwell.
Because my tumor is so giant, docs prescribed full mind radiation. I learn concerning the negative effects: The hair on my scalp would have been singed off. My scalp can be left coated with first-degree burns. My high quality of life, as I knew it, can be gone.
After months of analysis, my household and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion: There isn’t any therapy that might save my life, and the advisable remedies would have destroyed the time I had left.
I thought-about passing away in hospice care at my San Francisco Bay-area residence. But even with palliative medicine, I might develop doubtlessly morphine-resistant ache and endure persona adjustments and verbal, cognitive and motor lack of just about any type.
Because the remainder of my physique is younger and wholesome, I’m doubtless to bodily cling on for a very long time though most cancers is consuming my thoughts. I most likely would have suffered in hospice look after weeks and even months. And my household would have had to watch that.
I didn’t need this nightmare state of affairs for my household, so I began researching death with dignity. It is an end-of-life choice for mentally competent, terminally ailing sufferers with a prognosis of six months or much less to dwell. It would allow me to use the medical observe of help in dying: I might request and obtain a prescription from a doctor for medicine that I might self-ingest to finish my dying course of if it turns into insufferable.
I rapidly determined that death with dignity was the best choice for me and my household.
We had to uproot from California to Oregon, as a result of Oregon is one in all solely 5 states the place death with dignity is allowed.
I met the standards for death with dignity in Oregon, however establishing residency within the state to make use of the legislation required a monumental variety of adjustments. I had to discover new physicians, set up residency in Portland, seek for a brand new residence, acquire a brand new driver’s license, change my voter registration and enlist individuals to care for our animals, and my husband, Dan, had to take a go away of absence from his job. The overwhelming majority of households would not have the pliability, assets and time to make all these adjustments.
I’ve had the medicine for weeks. I’m not suicidal. If I had been, I might have consumed that medicine way back. I don’t need to die. But I’m dying. And I need to die alone phrases.
Brittany Maynard, advocate for ‘death with dignity,’ dies
I might not inform anybody else that she or he ought to select death with dignity. My query is: Who has the right to inform me that I don’t deserve this selection? That I deserve to endure for weeks or months in great quantities of bodily and emotional ache? Why ought to anybody have the right to make that selection for me?
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Now that I’ve had the prescription stuffed and it’s in my possession, I’ve skilled an amazing sense of reduction. And if I determine to change my thoughts about taking the medicine, I can’t take it.
Having this selection at the tip of my life has grow to be extremely essential. It has given me a way of peace throughout a tumultuous time that in any other case can be dominated by concern, uncertainty and ache.
Now, I’m ready to transfer ahead in my remaining days or even weeks I’ve on this lovely Earth, to search pleasure and love and to spend time touring to out of doors wonders of nature with these I like. And I do know that I’ve a security web.
Dying young and on her own terms
I plan to have fun my husband’s birthday on October 26 with him and our household. Unless my situation improves dramatically, I’ll look to cross quickly thereafter.
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I hope for the sake of my fellow American residents that I’ll by no means meet that this feature is accessible to you. If you ever end up strolling a mile in my sneakers, I hope that you’d at least be given the identical selection and that nobody tries to take it from you.
When my struggling turns into too nice, I can say to all these I like, “I love you; come be by my side, and come say goodbye as I pass into whatever’s next.” I’ll die upstairs in my bed room with my husband, mom, stepfather and greatest pal by my facet and cross peacefully. I can’t think about attempting to rob anybody else of that selection.
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