With his member’s bill, Liam McArthur, the MSP for Orkney, has reopened the debate over assisted dying in Scotland. The bill, if passed, would mean Scotland taking the lead in the UK. Allowing “competent adults who are terminally ill”, as the bill describes them, to choose to end their life is undoubtedly overdue; research shows public demand for it is overwhelming.
However, another group is being ignored in our discussion. For many a deterioration in health is too quick to plan an assisted death and for others, such as many cancer patients, there is too much uncertainty to make plans. For these patients an assisted death becomes appropriate only once they have lost the ability to make decisions for themselves such as when a cancer patient experiences severe pain just before their death. Their fate is left to palliative care doctors.
Through the death of my grandfather this year from cancer, I have seen first-hand how palliative care in Scotland can lead to painful, rather than painless, deaths. The last time I visited him he looked more like a skeleton than a man: unable to move, unable to drink, unable to talk, his eyelids almost fused together. We all knew he was just about to die.
Despite this, the palliative care team who treated him explained their focus was on keeping doses of pain relief to a minimum. Thanks to legal hurdles and the Hippocratic oath they were afraid of giving an overdose. I stood over his bed watching him writhing and screaming. The approach of minimising the use of painkillers meant he spent his last hours in severe pain. I may not be a medical professional but there is no way any doctor, nurse, activist or politician can ever convince me that was acceptable. No argument can outweigh the needless suffering taking place this very second.
For those with long-term and debilitating illnesses, sufficient assistance may soon be available. The public demand for such assisted dying is unavoidable, even for cautious and scaremongering policymakers. But what about those lying in a hospital bed as you read this, who have just taken a turn for the worse? Will they be left to die in pain? I am in no doubt that change is needed and needed now. My mother commented on my grandfather’s circumstance: “The dog would have got better treatment.” I love our dog, but that is simply not right. And I will not accept it.
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Fraser Laing is a student at the University of St Andrews
