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.
Those laws became accessible on June 19, 2019.
"I couldn't eat my dinner because I was crying so hard. Knowing from that day onwards, people like my mum would be able to ask the same question my mum had asked and instead of getting a 'No, we can't'. They'd get 'Yep, here are the forms, let's talk about it...there are no words'," Belinda told Mamamia.
"It was too far away and too late for my mum. It felt like the greatest tragedy," she said.
It's why Belinda started walking.
She walked all the way from Melbourne to Perth because she wanted to bring that same choice back home to her state of Western Australia.
It took 70 days and 4,500 kilometres but Belinda thinks the challenge saved her.
"I would have really struggled unless I was able to park that emotion somewhere," she explained, adding that her walk was a non-violent way to protest what had happened to her mum.
"Watching my mum die over the very final hours of her life was like watching a horror movie, but the star of the film was my mum. I couldn't turn it off, because you have to be there for those moments," she told Mamamia's news podcast The Quicky last year.
LISTEN: Here's Belinda on Mamamia's The Quicky last year.
Now in WA, laws of a similar kind are currently in the implementation process, a goal Belinda worked towards for an entire 12 months.
She admits when she finally took her "foot off the pedal" she fell into a heap.
"I didn't have time to plan how I would self care after... it was such high energy, and I used every ounce of my energy so when it was all over I had nothing left. The tank was empty. I am in the process now of rebuilding my emotional stores, and I am feeling so much better after a few months of R&R," she told Mamamia.
Belinda wants voluntary assisted dying to be a choice in every state and territory in Australia. This is something she will continue to help campaign for because right now the way she sees it - the options aren't good enough.
"She could have [taken her own life] ... that was an option for my mum. Another option was terminal starvation and dehydration, which is a fancy way of saying you stop eating and drinking and wait for your body to shut down. It's excruciating and can take weeks," she explained.
Belinda's mum was given morphine as she violently left this life, after previously being told "rest assured we will make you as comfortable as possible and give you as much morphine as you need".
What Belinda witnessed was not comfortable.
In fact, it was extremely traumatic not just for her mum but for the entire family.
"I think unfortunately there's this normalisation of people dying bad deaths in Australia. It shouldn't be normal. It should be shocking when someone dies like that," she said. "The grieving we were always going to have to do, but the trauma wasn't necessary."
Pushing away the trauma and the bad memories of her mum's death is something Belinda has only recently learnt how to master.
"No matter how badly it ends, it's so important to be able to seperate that," she said. "I am really glad I am able to do that now."
While Belinda wanted the trauma to end, grief is something she never wants to let go of.
"I don't want to stop grieving because grieving is remembering as well. I don't think it's a negative thing. I think there was a time earlier on where I thought grieving was something that had to be completed and I tried to 'get it out of my system', but I always came back to the feeling that I will be grieving her forever...and I think that's a beautiful thing," she told Mamamia.
Feature Image: Go Gentle Australia.
You can watch Belinda on tonight's episode of SBS Insight, Tuesday 8:30pm.
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.