LCMS Ping
Posted on 10/10/2014 7:27:18 AM PDT by Gamecock
’m not surprised that an Oct. 6, 2014 article by Nicole Weisensee Egan—titled “Terminally Ill 29-Year Old Woman: Why I’m Choosing to Die on My Own Terms” featuring a well-produced video found on People.com—has gone viral.
The video, which features interviews of Brittany Maynard and her family members, is very emotional. Maynard, who was diagnosed this past spring, suffers from a stage-four gliobastoma multiforme brain tumor. She has a very aggressive form of brain cancer, and it is difficult to control its growth. In her video story, she describes how she was diagnosed and relates her understanding that the glioblastoma will eventually kill her. She then relates her fear that this scenario will be “out of her control.”
As I watched the video, I wanted to hug Brittany and shed tears right along with her because I, too, know those fears. I was also diagnosed this past spring with a stage-four glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor.
I can identify with Maynard and her spunky, adventurous spirit. She describes her love of travel. In my profession with The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s mercy outreach, I’ve led medical mission teams and worked on relief projects in 11 countries, loving every minute of it. I have seen the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick. I have seen suffering that would make anyone’s stomach turn.
The Hardest Part Is Not Knowing When
Now I face my own prognosis of future suffering. Some days are joyful. Some days the diagnosis feels like a huge weight in my backpack.
The hardest part of a terminal diagnosis is not knowing the timeline. I speak candidly with my physicians and pray that they can keep my tumor under control with the latest therapies to extend my life, one more year, month, day. Someday, I hope my tumor qualifies to be studied in one of the many clinical trials for brain cancer. I’d like to think my situation was part of a cure for someone else.
My doctors have applauded my decision to step down from my physically and emotionally demanding job to spend precious time with my family. I have a husband and three daughters who I hope will always remember me as a strong, thoughtful (but bull-headed) woman, carrying Christ’s mercy and compassion for others in my soul with rich joy and meaning.
Suicide Is Not the Answer to Brain Cancer
And here is where my comparison with Brittany Maynard ends. Maynard chose to move her family to Oregon earlier this year to have legal access to physician-assisted suicide and to receive a prescription for drugs that she has stated she will use to take her life two days following her husband’s birthday, on Nov. 1, 2014. It’s interesting that Maynard steadfastly refuses to refer to her decision as an act of suicide, even though she will, quite literally, take her own life.
Many people who choose assisted-suicide have expressed that they are uncomfortable with the term. Assisted suicide, which means helping someone take his or her own life, has been redefined into the more euphemistic “aid in dying” or sometimes “death with dignity” campaign which has been spearheaded by the well-funded special-interest group Compassion and Choices (previously known as The Hemlock Society).
However well-intentioned, this is one area where the old adage that “Hard cases make bad law” comes into play. To make good policy decisions about assisted suicide for our society, we need to follow the rabbit trail all the way down the hole to see where it leads. Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, warned that “assisted suicide is not progressive, in fact, it puts many vulnerable people at risk, and we have already seen examples of that where it is legal.” Folks concerned about the rights of people with disabilities are worried about this.
Dignity Lies in Love
But there isn’t any dignity in cancer or other debilitating illness. In my own treatment, I’ve been poked, prodded, radiated, chemotherapied, and cut open so many times that I stopped worrying about being dignified quite some time ago. Instead, I prefer to get my dignity by appreciating the dear people who care for me with their individual expressions of love and prayers on my behalf.
Maynard can choose to call her act anything she wants to enable her to feel better about her decision, but that doesn’t change the facts about how she has chosen to die. Dr. Eric Chevlen, a diplomat of the American Boards of Internal Medicine, Medical Oncology, Hematology, and Pain Medicine and director of Palliative Care at St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown, Ohio, once quipped, “Just as rape is not about sex, euthanasia is not about comforting the dying. It is about power. What is intolerable to the (assisted suicide advocate) is not suffering or dying, but not having control over life and death.”
A recent opinion piece in The Atlantic by Ezekiel Emanuel (President Obama’s adviser on The Affordable Care Act) entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” forged ahead in the assisted suicide debate by equating the value of human life with that human’s ability to be productive.
Death Is Always Out of Our Hands
When I was a young mother, my father had a traumatic accident that severed his spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the neck down. The last five months of my father’s life, which he lived as a paraplegic, were filled with utter helplessness. He wasn’t productive in any meaningful way. He couldn’t even shave his own face. Would Emanuel or Maynard find my dad’s life useless? I didn’t. My siblings and I soaked up our father’s presence, realizing that caring for the needy person we loved so dearly showed each of us some unexpected things about ourselves. As writer Cheryl Magness says, caregivers get a chance to grow in compassion, responsibility, and selflessness as they care for those in need.
This will serve me now as I face my own debilitating mortality. Death sucks. And while this leads many to attempt to calm their fears by grasping for personal control over the situation, as a Christian with a Savior who loves me dearly and who has redeemed me from a dying world, I have a higher calling. God wants me to be comfortable in my dependence on Him and others, to live with Him in peace and comfort no matter what comes my way. As for my cancer journey, circumstances out of my control are not the worst thing that can happen to me. The worst thing would be losing faith, refusing to trust in God’s purpose in my life and trying to grab that control myself.
I watched Maynard’s six-minute video. I cried, and my heart broke for her and her family. I pray she changes her mind and decides to allow others to care for her in her illness. I felt blessed that my tumor came later in my life (I’m 51), and I have had the gift of raising three lovely daughters. I want my girls to learn servanthood and selflessness as they care for me. And I also want them to know that, for Christians, our death is not the end. Because our Savior, Jesus Christ, selflessly endured an ugly death on the cross and was laid in a borrowed tomb (no “death with dignity” there), He truly understands our sorrows and feelings of helplessness. I want my kids to know that Christ’s resurrection from that borrowed grave confirms that death could not hold Him, and it cannot hold me either—a baptized child of God!
Can you get born on your “own terms”? If so, then you can choose to die in that fashion—maybe.
Welcome to the 21st century, where making a decision to not euthanize yourself is news.
LCMS Ping
I’ve been praying for Brittany Maynard to change her mind. I think it will be terribly tragic for herself and her loved ones should she do so. I am disheartened by the number of people who are supporting her decision to off herself. None of us have the right to choose the timing or the manner of our own death.
We can certainly debate as to whether this story is news or not but it is an important think piece. End of life issues confront all of us and I think it is important to give at least some thought to the matter as both a personal and social circumstance. There was a recent and well-discussed article supporting assisted suicide as a personal choice and the article you deride is its counterpart. I for one found it compelling and while certainly not news, it at least deserves the same dignity as that expressed by its author.
This is SO beautiful.
Thank you.
She needs to get on Cannabis oil ASAP.
Modern medicine can keep us "alive" a little longer but that does not mean it's the best option.
I'm at the age where we lose parents and have lost a friend or few along the way and can't even pretend to feel invincible any more.
I'm grateful to have her story in my afternoon thought rotation while working through my to do list of drudgery jobs this afternoon. It will help tune my receiver to the right station.
Her view of dignity is important and a helpful reminder for me and for my thoughts about my mom and her care.
I just wish she didn't call it "her" tumor, since it seems more like an invading thing rather than something to take ownership of, but she's so far ahead of me with her thoughts, maybe I'm the one who's in error.
> stage-four gliobastoma multiforme ...
> ... difficult to control its growth.
The Standard of Care for this condition reportedly causes misery, poverty and no appreciable increase in lifespan.
Instead of suicide, people with any form of cancer for which there is no effective treatment (which is most of them), need to be looking at what appears to be at least a holding action: calorie-restricted ketogenic diet, exogenous ketone supplementation and hyperbaric therapy.
Here’s one blogger doing so: http://greymadder.net/
Why does it work?
Because the consensus somatic (gene) theory of cancer is probably incorrect. So then, is the Warburg/Seyfried metabolic theory of cancer correct? Perhaps not, but it appears to present at least a management technique that is effective in several anecdotal cases.
I remember a military story from WWII that on the surface sounds almost comic, but contains a very important principle about euthanasia, *and* the people who want to carry it out on others.
A “green” (no combat experience) American army unit had been sent to Europe, and was in a less-active second echelon area, setting up their company camp, with their company commander’s tent in the middle and a large security perimeter. Their Captain was doing paperwork outside with the First Sergeant on his field table that sunny day.
Two privates were on watch in their foxhole on the front of the perimeter, being checked out by a Lieutenant, and one private removed his helmet for some reason, which was seen by a German sniper far away.
Bang! A bullet parted his hair, skinning a track across his scalp and knocking him out briefly. Being a head wound, it bled profusely all over his face. The other private started firing wildly downrange, while the Lieutenant freaked out, seeing all that blood from an otherwise minor wound.
The Lieutenant saw that he was still alive, but he imagined him to be critically injured with severe brain damage. So he pulled out his .45 pistol, and decided to “put him out of his misery.”
Fortunately for the private, the Lieutenant had no experience with firing his gun, and was fumbling around with it, when the wounded private came to. Perhaps realizing what was happening, or just with an adrenaline rush, the wounded private bolted from the foxhole and took off running.
Meanwhile, the Captain was in the midst of some paperwork, despite having heard the gunshots of the other private, when a screaming, bloodied private ran past him, followed by a Lieutenant, still fumbling with his gun, so that he could kill the private.
The First Sergeant was a faster runner and stopped the potential tragedy. The private needed some stitches, but was otherwise fine, save a pounding headache.
But this story illustrates a major problem with euthanasia, that people are incapable of judging the suffering of others, but are filled to the brim with false empathy, imagining themselves suffering horribly under similar circumstances.
And this is just the start of the problem. People who kill other people soon become callous to death, and see it less as “helping”, than just as “less work for me, and ‘problem solved’.” From there, their rationalizations for killing go off in all directions, but usually smack of sanctimoniousness. “I’m doing a good thing!”, is no different from an abortionist claiming he is “helping women” by killing their babies.
It is no surprise that such killers prefer people who are least likely to resist being killed, physically or psychologically. To kill them is much easier than to kill someone who can and does resist.
In the UK, killers prefer to kill with starvation, as it is “passive” murder by neglect and omission, that is, neglecting to tell their victims families until it is too late.
Prayers for your friend pastor. My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer this past week. It was caught at a very early stage and she is scheduled to have surgery next week, plus radiation treatment after the surgery.
Thanks for sharing.
My 81 year old mom was diagnosed last December. After having many a long talk she decided to go forward with the chemo and surgery. Her prognosis without chemo was 60% ten year survival. With the chemo it would be 72% 10 year survival (These are after factoring in those who die of other causes for those in their 80s.)
She did very well and is again living a full life. She just bought a new car and is again active in her church.
I just said a prayer for your sister.
Thanks for the prayers. I had her added to the prayer list at out LCMS congregation this week. She just turned 60 a few months ago. Good thing the docs caught it early. She has a very good chance of beating her cancer.
**The Hardest Part Is Not Knowing When **
So the people who have this knowledge need to live each day as though it were their last — with eternal life always at the forefront of their day.
Prayers for them.
As I read further —
**euthanasia is not about comforting the dying. It is about power. What is intolerable to the (assisted suicide advocate) is not suffering or dying, but not having control over life and death.”**
God has the power over life and death.
My husband also had a brain tumor and died naturally. Although I would never recommend hospice to anyone.
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