Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 7, 1991 TAG: 9103070018
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
She had refused chemotherapy because the chance of cure seemed slim. When the time for dying finally came, she wanted to go quickly. So after long talks, Diane's doctor wrote a prescription for sleeping pills and told her how many she needed to kill herself.
Cases like this probably are not rare in medicine. But no one really knows, because physicians rarely speak of such things, even to each other.
This case is different.
The doctor who helped Diane end her suffering described how and why he did it, in an essay in today's New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Timothy E. Quill, an internist at the University of Rochester hospital, said he decided to tell his story because he wants to bring the discussion of death and suffering into the open.
His patient, identified only as Diane, was 45 when she said goodbye to her husband and son and then died about a year ago, quietly on a couch, covered with her favorite shawl.
Quill, her doctor for eight years, had told Diane she had a 1-in-4 chance of surviving chemotherapy and bone marrow transplantation and gaining a long-term cure. Diane said no.
The doctor made sure she understood her decision. Although he disagreed, he gradually adjusted to it. Then she brought up another difficult subject.
She wanted no part of the drugged nether world of terminal care. When she was ready to go, she wanted to take her own life as painlessly as possible. At her request, he wrote her a prescription for barbiturates and told her how to use them for sleep and for death.
"I wrote the prescription with an uneasy feeling about the boundaries I was exploring - spiritual, legal, professional and personal," Quill wrote. "Yet I also felt strongly that I was setting her free to get the most out of the time she had left and to maintain dignity and control on her own terms until her death."
When she at last ended it, Quill told the medical examiner she died of acute leukemia rather than suicide, which would have prompted a police investigation.
by CNB