Re:Canada euthanasia now accounts for nearly one in 20 deaths
by geysersam on Thursday December 12, 2024 @06:24PM
(#42404459)
That must have been tough. May I ask what made them ill? The odds that they both got the same relatively rare disease by chance seems slim
Re:Canada euthanasia now accounts for nearly one in 20 deaths
by wpietri on Thursday December 12, 2024 @07:39PM
(#42404915)
Yeah, they were actually both left temporal lobe glioblastomas. Every time that comes up with a doctor they get a funny look and ask where they lived, obviously suspecting some environmental cause.
The short answer is people almost never know the cause of a glioblastoma. My parents only lived in the same place for like 6 years, and they moved around a fair bit. Nobody else in my family had one so far, so the next likely data points are me and my brother. Not a lot you can do anyhow, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My parents both died of glioblastomas, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. As the surgeon explained after the biopsy, "This is what you will die from." 3 months from diagnosis to death for my mom, a year and change for my dad. Seeing that process up close made very clear to me what I wanted for myself.
All of this was reinforced for me by the experience of Brittany Maynard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany_Maynard
She was diagnosed with a glioblastoma and was given 6 months to live. She moved from California to Oregon so she could die in a controlled and humane manner. She wrote about that here: https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/opinion/maynard-assisted-suic...
I get the thought of medically-assisted suicide wigs some people out, and we have to be careful to make sure the urge isn't just a temporary distortion of mood and thought. But having seen it up close, I am very much not interested in spending months dying slowly and dragging my family through hell just to make sure random people not involved don't have to think about hard things or deal with their feelings about death.