From Patient Rights Action Fund: For Complete Post, Click Here…

Anyone dying in discomfort may legally today, in all 50 states, receive palliative sedation. The patient would be sedated and discomfort relieved while the dying process takes place. This is a legal practice that accomplishes the supposed goal of assisted suicide laws without all the baggage.

But proponents of assisted suicide laws are trying to make it just another aspect of end-of-life care. A common proponent talking point in the debate is that it’s fine for one person to want to die naturally but everyone should have the “choice” to take the lethal drug cocktail and end their life on their own terms. This simply doesn’t tell the whole story. Legislation cannot be written in such a way that assisted suicide is legal but does not disproportionately affect vulnerable people. 

People with lived experience of psychiatric disability are put at great risk of suicide contagion. People with perfectly treatable illnesses and disabilities, i.e., NOT terminal, could receive lethal drugs. There is no objective oversight to prevent coercion at the time of ingestion or to be killed with the drugs against their will. Once these drugs leave the pharmacy, zero oversight.

Shouldn’t we be concentrating on getting people better access to mental healthcare, palliative care, pain management, nursing care, and hospice programs? We should prioritize helping patients have all the resources and information they need on the options that do exist, like hospice care which is specifically for end-of-life, instead of adding assisted suicide to the list of care options available. 

By Lauren LaRocca: For Complete Post, Click Here…

The pandemic has created the perfect storm for an unlikely health condition: brain injuries.

When Emma* found herself gasping for breath one evening in July, she shrugged it off. As a 38-year-old with no prior health issues, she assumed it would resolve on its own. But as the night went on, she continued to find it difficult to breathe, as though there were a heavy weight on her chest.

The Salisbury resident, who lives alone, phoned 911 around dawn and was taken to the ER by ambulance. There, she was wheeled on a gurney to a nursing station, where she waited for what felt like 45 minutes before finally, somewhat desperately, telling the staff she really needed to be seen now. She couldn’t breathe. In retrospect, she wishes she had called 911 immediately that evening, rather than waiting until dawn, as she realizes that was just more time her brain was not getting enough oxygen. She was put on a nasal cannula, which delivered oxygen through her nose.

Despite a negative COVID-19 test, Emma was told she likely had COVID—or another virus. Her white blood cell count was high, but all other tests came back normal. After two days, she was released.

“I came home to a whole new world,” she says. Her brain was not functioning as it used to, and seven months later, her symptoms persist. She struggles with short-term memory, in particular, and, like so many others suffering from brain injuries, she’s had difficulty finding the care that she needs.

“I don’t really know what the lessened oxygen has done to my brain, but I’m aware that lack of oxygen can cause memory problems,” she says. “I keep returning to: There must be damage to some areas of my brain that otherwise functioned before the lack of oxygen…Now I’ve come to terms with the fact that this kind of experience does lead to a brain injury.”

While people are becoming more aware of traumatic brain injuries, such as the kind you receive from a blow to the head, non-traumatic brain injuries—anoxic and hypoxic injuries caused by oxygen deprivation—have similar chronic effects, and can be just as detrimental and tricky to treat.