LYING ABOUT DYING
SMITH, WESLEY J.
LYING ABOUT DYING by Wesley J. Smith WHEN JACK KEVORKIAN APPEARED on 60 Minutes the Sunday before Thanksgiving to explain his killing of Thomas Youk, a man with Lou Gehrig's disease, Kevorkian...
...Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes could easily have found that out...
...I can vouch for that...
...Bob was devastated by the program...
...One expert Wallace could have interviewed is Dr...
...But Bob despised it...
...In my view, the pro-euthanasia followers' posture is a great threat to the foundation on which all life is based...
...Too many people," he wrote, "have accepted the presumption that an extermination of some human lives can be just...
...True, terminal illness is frightening, but the majority of us overpower the symptoms and are great contributors to life...
...But once we started with the morphine, he couldn't believe how comfortable it made her...
...As the disease destroys the body's muscular ability, the diaphragm weakens, and it becomes progressively harder for patients to breathe...
...You're a writer," I said...
...To treat his discomfort, he was prescribed the breathing-assistance machine, which did not extend his life but eliminated the feeling of suffocation...
...Had Wallace done his job as a journalist and asked a competent doctor about the proper care of patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, the 15 million people who watched Youk die would have learned that the very symptoms he feared most—choking and suffocation—could have been virtually eliminated with proper medical care...
...I know...
...A small dose of morphine is a godsend to patients experiencing shortness of breath," Hunter says...
...Walter R. Hunter, a medical director of the Hospice of Michigan (located in the county where Kevorkian lives) and chairman of the ethics committee for the National Hospice organization...
...Where has our sense of community gone...
...I exhort everyone: Life is worth living, and life is worth receiving...
...Toward the end of his life, he also used small doses of morphine...
...Bob was my most recent patient at a hospice where I volunteer...
...if more is needed, we can teach the patient's family to use a simple suction device, similar to that used by dentists...
...Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is the red flag waved most vigorously by propagandists for so-called mercy killing...
...I remember his anger in January 1997, after Nightline aired a program about a Rhode Island patient with ALS who was asking for assisted suicide...
...It is how my good friend Bob died of Lou Gehrig's disease—peacefully, in his sleep...
...The media predictably rise to the bait because this neurological disorder is devastating, causing progressive debilitation, paralysis, and death...
...once a week, for about a year and a half, I visited Bob for several hours...
...But what about suffocation...
...People like Bob are the ostensible beneficiaries of the euthanasia movement...
...Given the likelihood that the millions of viewers who watched Kevorkian kill Youk almost certainly included patients with the same disease and their families, it was unconscionably cruel of Wallace to allow Kevorkian's propaganda to go unchallenged...
...There is a slow buildup and the patient sleeps more often...
...He was worried about that and the slowing of her breathing...
...Morphine isn't always necessary to treat breathless-ness in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease...
...I recently started a patient with late-stage ALS on morphine," Hunter says...
...We have medications that control secretions substantially...
...He too, would later die naturally and peacefully...
...And it doesn't mean consigning the patient to a drug-induced haze...
...Bob's article, "I Don't Want a Choice to Die," was published in the February 19, 1997, San Francisco Chronicle...
...Death comes in the patient's sleep...
...There are other palliatives, too, including a machine that forces air up the patient's nostrils to make breathing easier...
...Bob, like millions of other disabled and terminally ill people, lived fully and with dignity until his natural death...
...Indeed, Hunter says, in the typical progression of the disease, "the body is unable to clear carbon dioxide from the blood...
...Nor should they choke...
...Wesley J. Smith, an attorney for the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, is the author of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder (Times Books...
...After Bob became ill, he began to write a novel, first by hand and when that became physically impossible, by dictation to a computer...
...So when he asked me what he should do about the Nightline show, the answer was clear...
...A writer writes...
...Hunter was appalled at the depiction of Lou Gehrig's disease presented on 60 Minutes...
...They make me feel like a token presence in the world...
...During that time, he did begin to feel breathless...
...The key is to find a doctor who is an expert in such care...
...I live it every day...
...Wallace, a vocal euthanasia supporter, accepted this excuse at face value rather than digging more deeply...
...According to Hunter and other experts, with proper treatment, no ALS patient should feel that they are suffocating...
...The facts of their lives and deaths are not far to seek, and are routinely lied about by the likes of Kevorkian...
...It is quite gentle and painless...
...No one with ALS should be allowed to choke," Hunter told me...
...And that is hope...
...Indeed, the British physician, Dame cicely Saunders, the creator of the modern hospice movement, has written that she has treated hundreds of patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, and not one of them choked or suffocated to death...
...But it doesn't have to be the excruciating death by choking or suffocation that euthanasia activists often luridly depict...
...But they were apparently too busy congratulating themselves for their supposed journalistic courage to do so...
...She is the wife of an anesthesiologist...
...LYING ABOUT DYING by Wesley J. Smith WHEN JACK KEVORKIAN APPEARED on 60 Minutes the Sunday before Thanksgiving to explain his killing of Thomas Youk, a man with Lou Gehrig's disease, Kevorkian justified his crime to Mike Wallace by claiming Youk was scared to death of choking on his own saliva...
...He put it to me this way: "They are trying to push me out of the well-lit boulevard into the dark alleys...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 13
