When Belinda Teh arrived at the hospital the morning her mother died, her mum was unrecognisable.
Her eyes were pointing in different directions, she was all sorts of different colours, and she looked like a tortured shadow of herself.
She spent her final four hours on this earth choking, spluttering, twitching and gasping for air. It was a horrible way to die.
WATCH: Belinda is appearing on tonight’s episode of Insight. Here’s a preview.
Mareia Teh had asked twice for medical assistance to die peacefully from the advanced, aggressive, triple-negative, terminal breast cancer that had already promised to take her life – and that morning when her then 23-year-old daughter came to her bedside one final time, she looked her in the eye and said her name.
“It’s the reason I get up in the morning and campaign [for voluntary assisted dying]. She knew what was happening to her,” a now 27-year-old Belinda told Mamamia.
Just over a year after her mother’s death in April, 2017, news came through that Victoria was to become the first state in Australia to bring voluntary assisted dying into law.
Top Comments
I have watched family members fight to die and I too realised it didn’t have to be that way. Palliative care can be good or bad yes that’s true but for some people it just isn’t an option, it’s not what they want or should have to go through. I’m proud to be in a state that recognises this and made it legal to die with dignity.
Dying with dignity is not limited to euthanasia. Euthanasia allows the individual to decide when they die and for some people knowing they have this option can ease their anxiety. As for a 'bad death', in the majority of cases it is due to inadequate Palliative Care and euthanasia should not be the first alternative in those cases, unless the patient's symptoms cannot be controlled.
See, for me this is the key issue - that Belinda's mother should not have had to experience this and that it is a failure in the quality of palliative care that was supplied to her and not the fact that - lacking that care - she should have been able to choose to end her life earlier. There's another article here on Mamamia - https://www.mamamia.com.au/... - where Brandon Janous talks about losing his wife Rachel to cancer, and the key difference is that she was getting appropriate palliative care and was not experiencing this sort of pain. That's where I think we should be directing our energy and our funding.
As a Palliative Care nurse I agree with your statement. There was absolutely no reason why Ms Teh's mother should have been in such distress and it appears there could have been a failure of adequate symptom control. Most dying patients have a cocktail of drugs, not just morphine, given via a pump which in the vast majority of cases ensures a peaceful and dignified death. Physician assisted suicide should not be a subsitute for poor palliative care.
Agree (doctor here). There is a small proportion of patients in whom symptoms cannot be relieved by optimum palliative care (wherein VPAD has a place), but in the majority, peace and dignity are very much attainable with proper, adequate palliation. Australia is woefully under resourced in that regard.
My grandmother has dementia, was refusing to open her mouth, was unable to talk for over a week, was groaning, skin and bones, and had nil by mouth for a week. When they forced her mouth open to give her a moist swab, her tongue was like a little dried finger. She had almost died a month before but had been revived, after that my family had signed a do not resuscitate order. So no drip. Just a painful horrendous horrific wait for death. Yet they refused to give her morphine, telling me "It would depress her respiratory system" and "She's not in any pain". This was 8 years ago and I still fibd it distressing to think of my dearest grandmother's last weeks. It would not be allowed to happen to a dog, but they let it happen to a gentle, kind, loving, giving lady. There needs to be laws about this.