To my readers: Many people have asked me whether a death doula could help them access medical aid in dying in Colorado. Since I didn’t know the answer to that question, I invited a death doula to write a guest post. I am grateful to Vanessa Johnston for agreeing to educate us! Joanne By Vanessa Johnston Denver EOL Doula, LLC [...]
I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Jean Abbott, a retired physician, ethicist and hospice advocate about the concept of “death with dignity.” As a result of that conversation, I invited her to be a guest blogger so she could share her thoughts directly with you. Leave a comment, below, to tell me what you think about the subject. What [...]
In the US, we struggle, state by state, to get medical aid in dying laws passed, while in Canada, the whole country was approved at once in June 2016, through a ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court that required the Parliament of Canada to change the country’s laws to give dying people more control over how their lives end. It [...]
In an Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Denver Post (May 22, 2022), columnist Krista Kafer pushed a couple of my buttons. Those of you who have read my book or followed this blog from the beginning, know how much I dislike the terms “doctor-assisted suicide” and “physician-assisted suicide” when they are used to describe medical aid in dying. If you read [...]
What’s it like to participate in medical aid in dying from a physician’s perspective? It’s not easy to figure out, because current regulations intentionally hide the identities of participating physicians. A clever team of researchers from the University of Colorado School of Medicine devised a way to survey the Colorado physicians who are most likely to care for patients looking for [...]
I stumbled across an excellent article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek written by Esmé E Deprez about a woman named Sandy Morris and her journey with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). The article explains how her illness inspired Morris to fight to change California’s End-of-Life Options Act, which has been in existence since 2016. Like me, Morris is a former [...]
I was very excited to discover another memoir, besides mine, about a husband and wife's journey with medical aid in dying, this one by Irvin and Marilyn Yalom. The two write alternating chapters, sharing their thoughts and feelings, until Marilyn reaches the end of her tolerance for the misery precipitated by her multiple myeloma and ends her life using the [...]