Month: February 2019

Dying Well?

nancyvalko brain injury, Cancer, Compassion & Choices, food and water, medical ethics

I discovered that former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Katy Butler is now publishing yet another book on dying well (her first book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” was a best seller) when I read her lead essay in the February 8, 2019 Wall Street Journal article titled “Preparing for a Good End of Life”.

However, I recognized her name from reading her 2014 interview with Compassion and Choices , the well-funded former Hemlock Society that promotes physician-assisted suicide .

In that interview, she urged people to back the 2014 “Better Care. Lower Cost Act” sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon “to improve appropriate medical support for people with chronic illness” and to “advocate to reduce payments to doctors who perform futile ‘Hail Mary’ surgeries, tests and treatments near the end of life”. Ms Butler also added that “we have an epidemic of unnecessary suffering at the end of life, and what’s more, it’s expensive!” (All emphasis added)

In that interview, Ms. Butler also talked about how her mother was “exhausted from nonstop caregiving” and how they fought doctors to have her father’s pacemaker turned off after he developed dementia, couldn’t walk to the neighborhood pool, became deaf and “too blind to read the New York Times-his last remaining pleasure”. Ms. Butler said she was glad to learn “from Judith Schwartz at Compassion and Choices that we each have a constitutional right to refuse any medical treatment or ask for its withdrawal.” (Compassion and Choices also promotes VSED, the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking, as well as terminal sedation as two legal options to hasten death in states without physician-assisted suicide laws.)

SCARE TACTICS?

In the Wall Street Journal article, Ms. Butler flatly states-without a source-that “Pain is a major barrier to a peaceful death, and nearly half of dying Americans suffer from uncontrolled pain.” (Emphasis added)

However, in an article “Pain Control at the End of Life” , June Dahl, PhD, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a founder of the American Alliance of Cancer Pain Initiatives states that:

“Thanks to recent advances in pain treatments, roughly 90 to 95 percent of all dying patients should be able to experience substantial relief from pain.”

Although Ms. Butler doesn’t mention physician-assisted suicide specifically, she does strongly advocate taking control of how we die, especially as we get older, because “Advanced medicine is replete with treatments (ventilator, dialysis, defibrillators, feeding tubes, to name a few) that postpone death and prolong misery without restoring health“. (Emphasis added)

She writes that “The best way to achieve a peaceful death is by planning ahead and enlisting the help of loved ones.”

In the Wall Street Journal article, she approvingly writes:

“When Liz Salmi’s mentor lay unconscious on a ventilator in a dark, windowless ICU room, attended by a cacophony of hisses and electronic bloops, she and other close friends lobbied for a better setup. All monitors but one were silenced, a doctor removed the breathing tube, and nurses and aides gurneyed her dying friend quickly into the ICU’s “best room”—a sunny spot, with windows opening to the outdoors.” (Emphasis added)

In this instance, note that the friends-apparently not the family or a “living will”- lobbied  the doctor to remove (not try to wean off) the ventilator. I am not surprised since I have personally heard some doctors say that, if in doubt, it might be legally safer not to treat rather than treat a patient because of the risk of a future lawsuit.

These kinds of articles and books are being used as “end-of-life education” for both the public and professionals. Can this be dangerous?

CAN WHAT YOU SAY POTENTIALLY BE USED AGAINST YOU?

My own mother often told me “I never want to be a burden on you children”. Then she developed Alzheimer’s and a terminal thyroid cancer. I was asked if the family wanted her fed if she got worse. “Of course, if she needs it”, I responded. My mother should die from her condition, not from starvation and dehydration. I  never told the doctors her comment about not wanting to be a burden because she wasn’t a burden. Mom died shortly after she went to a nursing home for safety reasons and we spoon-fed her at the end. She had no pain, thanks to a short course of radiation and chemo that she tolerated. My last memory of my mother was her smiling and enjoying the attention of her family before she died in her sleep.

In 1990, 2 years after my mother’s death, Nancy Cruzan died after 12 long days without a feeding tube, even after the US Supreme Court ruled that Missouri could require “clear and convincing evidence” that she would not want a feeding tube if she was in a “vegetative state.” At the time of the decision, there was no evidence of this.

However, Nancy’s parents later returned to a Missouri court with some of Nancy’s former co-workers who testified that they recalled her saying she would never want to live ‘like a vegetable’.

Three years later in a letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the future architects of Obamacare, acknowledged that this “proof” of Nancy Cruzan’s alleged statement rested only on “fairly vague and insubstantial comments to other people”.

However and most disturbing, he also wrote that:

“…increasingly it will be our collective determination as to what lives are worth living that will decide how incompetent patients are treated. We need to begin to articulate and justify these collective determinations.” (Emphasis added.) Source: The American Journal of Medicine January 1993 Volume 94 p. 115

CONCLUSION

As a hospice and critical care nurse, I strove to make sure dying patients and their families had a good death, either in a hospital or other institution or at home.

Personally, my husband and I also made a careful durable power of attorney document that only designates each other as our decision maker with the right to make decisions about our care rather than signing a “living will” to refuse potential future treatments or set possible future conditions like dementia where we would want treatment stopped or withheld. Instead, we want all current options, risks and benefits of treatment fully explained to the decision maker based on the current condition.

I also encourage people to check out information sites like the Healthcare Advocacy and Leadership organization (I am an advisor) and magazines like “Informed-A Guide for Critical Medical Decisions”  which has sections explaining ventilators, CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation), feeding tubes, use and misuse of opioids and sedatives as well as other end of life considerations.

Death is a journey we all will take someday. Especially in today’s world, we should protect ourselves and our loved ones by trying to ensure a truly good death.

The Most Important Thing I Told a Maryland Legislator

nancyvalko assisted suicide, Compassion & Choices, disability, law, medical ethics, pro-life

I just recently returned from a trip to Maryland where Jack Ames of Defend Life asked me to speak to various groups, hopefully including legislators, about opposing a current physician-assisted suicide bill in the Maryland legislature. The Maryland “End of Life Options” bill was, as usual, based on the first physician-assisted suicide law passed in Oregon with a few additional loopholes.

I was able to speak to many groups during my trip but unfortunately, I could not be scheduled to speak at the legislature’s committee meeting where people from both sides of the issue were able to speak.

However, one of the Defend Life people and I went to the statehouse to see if we could get in to talk to some legislators personally. We were only able to get to speak to one legislator and he was considered to be on the side of passing such a bill. We were told we only had 5 minutes to talk to him.

We were there for much longer.

We talked about our personal experiences, especially about my 30 year old, physically healthy daughter Marie who killed herself after a 16-year struggle with substance abuse using an assisted suicide technique she learned after reading pro-assisted suicide advocate Derek Humphry’s book Final Exit.

I told him about Marie’s death which was horrific instead of peaceful and that was like an atom bomb dropped on our family. I talked about the reality of suicide contagion which led two people close to Marie became suicidal but who were able to be saved. We talked about the increasing epidemic of suicides we have now  and how seductive is the message that killing ourselves can solve problems like not wanting to be a burden on our families. That is what my daughter told me and one of the biggest reasons given by people who have resorted to physician-assisted suicide.

I also told him about at least six problems with physician-assisted suicide laws that most legislators-and the public-don’t know but that are inherent in physician-assisted laws. These include such problems as the total immunity for doctors and the secrecy involved, mandatory falsification of physician-assisted suicide death certificates and the obvious medical discrimination between treating suicidal people who are physically healthy and suicidal people who are considered terminally ill and seeking physician-assisted suicide.

I also told him about my experiences as a nurse with suicidal people-some of whom were terminally ill-and how (except for my daughter) they all changed their minds with listening, support and referral to a mental health specialist. I also told him about a UCLA project started when California legalized physician-assisted suicide. The project offered an intensive intake process for patient requesting physician-assisted suicide conducted by trained psychotherapists and social workers instead of physicians and offering help and support for any needs the patient might have. Not only did the project show that “most of what patients needed was to discuss their feelings about their approaching death and process their grief and sense of loss”, but also that “only” 25% of patients went on to commit physician-assisted suicide.

When you combine this with the fact that an admitted 1/3 of terminally ill Oregon patients who obtain the lethal overdose for assisted suicide never take it and with no follow-up as to whether the diagnosis was wrong, people changed their minds or even what happened to the dangerous lethal medication in the home etc., it is obvious that lethal mistakes are being made.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I TOLD THE LEGISLATOR

However, what seemed to be the most important point that stunned the legislator was telling him that if he voted for the physician-assisted suicide bill, he would have to personally shoulder the responsibility for the lives subsequently lost that obviously could have been saved.

I told him that like other ethical medical professionals, my most profound fear was harming or worst of all killing a patient, however inadvertently. I told him that despite my decades of nursing, I always knew I would have to leave my profession if such a tragedy happened because I would be devastated and lose my confidence in my abilities.

I told him that now with the facts we gave him, it was up to him to vote responsibly and hopefully share our information with others.

CONCLUSION

Most people assume that legislators are always lawyers who carefully read and understand legislation before voting. Wrong!

And most people don’t understand that most legislators rely on lobbyists for their information. Well-funded groups like Compassion and Choices are able to afford lobbyists, activists, access to sympathetic media outlets, etc. that promote their physician-assisted suicide agenda while other groups like pro-life groups and disability advocates have to rely on passionate volunteers.

Years ago, a legislator here in my home state of Missouri said he felt his constituents were against a certain piece of legislation. Why? Because he said he had received 4 letters!

This was before the internet has made it easier to contact our representatives but this shows how powerful our individual efforts can be.

We need everyone to speak out and speak up, especially when it comes to dangerous legislative bills like physician-assisted suicide.

 

 

 

Why Can’t We Protect Babies who Survive Abortion?

nancyvalko abortion, law, medical ethics, nursing

I still remember my shock when nurse Jill Stanek came forward to describe how she discovered a baby with Down Syndrome born alive after a late-term abortion who was left in a dirty utility room to die at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois in 1999. She found that these second or even third trimester babies were sometimes born alive after an induced labor abortion. At great risk both professionally and personally, Jill Stanek fought this barbaric practice publicly and testified in Congress. This resulted in the passage of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002.

Just a year later, Congress was finally able to pass The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003  many years after it was discovered that abortionists could ensure the death of the baby by delivering the baby feet first except for the head and then suctioning out the baby’s brain.

But in October 2003, abortionist Warren Hern wrote an article explaining how he got around the new law:

“I reassured her (a patient) that I do not perform the “partial-birth” procedure and that there is no likelihood that the ban’s passage would close my office and keep me from seeing her. The fetus cannot be delivered “alive” in my procedure—as the ban stipulates in defining prohibited procedures—because I begin by giving the fetus an injection that stops its heart immediately.” (Emphasis added)

And just last year, the US House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 4712) that:

  • Requires health care practitioners present at the time a child is born alive during an abortion or attempted abortion to exercise the same degree of care to preserve the life and health of the child as any health care practitioner would provide to a child born alive at the same gestational age;

  • Requires that children born alive during an abortion or attempted abortion be transported and admitted to a hospital immediately following the administration of emergency care;

However and just days ago, this Act was blocked from unanimous consent in the US Senate by Democrats .

This happened despite the controversial on-air comments by Democrat Governor Northam of Virginia defending a bill allowing abortions up to birth. When asked what would happen if the baby was born after the abortion, Gov. Northam said that “the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” (Emphasis added)

In other words, the same infanticide by neglect that nurse Jill Stanek discovered in 1999.

The Virginia abortion bill thankfully died in committee but there is now a frenzy among abortion supporters to pass radical pro-abortion laws like New York’s in other states like Rhode Island  and Vermont that allow abortions up to birth, allow non-doctors to perform abortions and to prohibit any effort to “deny, regulate or restrict” abortion.

The most recent and extreme bill just passed the House in New Mexico. This bill redefines abortion as merely “health care” and even removes conscience rights for medical professionals who refuse to participate. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has promised to sign the bill into law if it passes the New Mexico Senate.

CONCLUSION

In my home town of St. Louis, Missouri, the US Supreme Court voted 7-2 in the infamous 1857  Dred Scott v Sandford decision about slavery which held that black people were an “inferior class of beings”  and thus ” had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them”.

It took a civil war and the Emancipation Proclamation to end this travesty. The Dred Scott decision is now remembered as a turning point that ignited a political firestorm.

Will these current outrageous efforts to also make unborn babies an “inferior class of beings” with “no rights or privileges” prick the conscience of the American people and become a turning point in the fight to restore respect for the lives of preborn human beings?

We must never give up trying!