The End in
Two Acts
Working with a client meant providing emotional support, discussing end-of-life decisions and, if the conversation moved in that direction, helping people such as Tom, terminally ill people without the legal choice Oregonians had, figure out how to hasten their own deaths.
Tom had decided against the “9mm injection” as a way to end his life. It would be too traumatic for his family. He didn’t want to leave behind a mess. He wanted to do what Oregonians could do — take a lethal dose of barbiturates. But Helen knew how difficult getting a prescription could be, how nerve-wracking the process could become, how much time and energy it could take away from the last months or weeks or life. It was possible, though. At Compassion & Choices, they called it the “wink-wink approach,” a covert discussion that went on between terminally ill people and sympathetic doctors and hospice workers.
It worked like this: A Compassion & Choices counselor provided information about which one of six different drugs to ask for (depending on the person, the illness and other medications being taken) and how to phrase the request to a physician. Then a terminally ill person, using coded language that obscured how the drug would be used, asked for a prescription from the doctor. Although nothing was said about ending life, the doctor almost always knew why the prescription was being requested. A sympathetic doctor might write such a prescription.