Brittany Maynard is a 29-year-old newlywed who loves to travel. She and husband Dan Diaz were actively trying to start a family when Maynard began having debilitating headaches. In January, she was diagnosed with brain cancer and surgery failed to shrink the tumor. In April, she was told she had Stage 4 Glioblastoma and that she had only about six months to live. After researching her condition thoroughly, Maynard and her family moved to Oregon so she could take advantage of the Death with Dignity Act, which will allow Maynard to end her life on her own terms. Her decision has opened a dialogue.
Maynard has worked as an advocate for Compassion and Choices over the last several months to educate people on why she believes more states need to allow terminally ill patients to end their lives on their own terms. Maynard has been given a prescription that she can take when her suffering becomes too unbearable for either herself or her family and, as of now, Maynard has set Nov. 1 as her date to die.
In a lengthy blog post, Maynard described what brought her to the decision that she has made and insists she is not suicidal:
"Because my tumor is so large, doctors prescribed full brain radiation. I read about the side effects: The hair on my scalp would have been singed off. My scalp would be left covered with first-degree burns. My quality of life, as I knew it, would be gone.
"After months of research, my family and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion: There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left.
"I considered passing away in hospice care at my San Francisco Bay-area home. But even with palliative medication, I could develop potentially morphine-resistant pain and suffer personality changes and verbal, cognitive and motor loss of virtually any kind.
"Because the rest of my body is young and healthy, I am likely to physically hang on for a long time even though cancer is eating my mind. I probably would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months. And my family would have had to watch that. I did not want this nightmare scenario for my family, so I started researching death with dignity. It is an end-of-life option for mentally competent, terminally ill patients with a prognosis of six months or less to live. It would enable me to use the medical practice of aid in dying: I could request and receive a prescription from a physician for medication that I could self-ingest to end my dying process if it becomes unbearable. I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family."
Maynard's devastating personal story as well as her decision to die on her own terms has had a huge impact on everyone reading it. It opens up the dialogue on whether or not dying with dignity is actually suicide and people have weighed in with various opinions and thoughts.
Should death with dignity for a terminally ill patient be an option in all states, or does it amount to suicide and is that something that should be considered a medical option nationwide? Comment below.
