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Thursday, 29 November, 2001, 14:10 GMT
What it's like to help someone die
![]() Terminally ill Diane Pretty - who has since died - and her husband, Brian
Here Rob Jonquière, a retired Dutch doctor, reflects in our weekly Real Time series on a patient who asked him to end her life.
She was 52 when she died. In earlier days, she had had Hodgkin's disease which was cured, and then she developed breast cancer which was cured, and after that she had ovarian cancer. When the doctor told her he could not cure her this time, she raised the issue of assisted suicide with me. I had been her family doctor for many years; I had accompanied her on her way through all these medical problems, so she knew me very well and that's why she dared to talk to me about it. Long and considered process We had spoken about her condition many times. If you talk about that - and neither of us was shy to give death its name - you talk about the fact that the end is near.
At first she said her limit was the moment she could not get out of bed, could not get herself to the toilet. Once that moment arrived, she said, 'Now I'm here, I want to wait a little longer'. I think she realised that others could care for her, and that it meant something to them to do so. She set new limits, and again she shifted, maybe three or four times in all.
She told me then that because she knew I would help her if it was too bad in the end, it had made it possible for her to shift her limits, to live a little longer. The fear of unbearable suffering was worse than the suffering itself. The time comes The morning after those snowdrops were by her bed, I got a phone call from her partner to say that she wanted euthanasia. I hesitated, a bit frightened that I had to do it at last, and said that I would be there once I'd seen my other patients.
We gathered around her bedside - her partner, the reverend and I - to talk and say goodbye. She knew what was going to happen, and again she told me that this was what she wanted. I administered first a large dose of sleeping pills and she drifted into a deep sleep. After five minutes, I gave her a muscle relaxant which lames the breathing apparatus and the heart - this is the way we do it still. Her breathing stopped, her heart stopped and she died quietly a few minutes later. My reaction was a complex one - a sadness at losing a friend, but also a feeling of content. I had been able to give her the last thing she wanted, which was help to die peacefully.
It was an utterly criminal act then. But I did not feel that I had committed a crime - I had done something good for somebody. Dr Rob Jonquière is the director of the main pro-euthanasia lobby in the Netherlands, the Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
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