Man Suffering Incurable Neurological Disorder Records Staff Seemingly Offering Assisted Suicide
In the play and later movie, “Whose Life Is It Anyway,” a quadriplegic patient sues a hospital for denying him the right to die.
The hospital loses the suit, but the doctor gives the patient the option of dying in the hospital.
The doctor offers this in case the patient changes his mind about dying and wants medical care.
But that was then.
This year, employees at an Ontario hospital repeatedly offered a dying patient the option of a hospital-assisted suicide, according to Canada’s CTV News.
The patient, Roger Foley, 42, is afflicted with cerebellar atoxia, a neurological disease that paralyzes his arms and legs.
Unhappy with his hospital treatment and denied the right to die at home with hospice care, Foley was given the stark option of medically assisted suicide by hospital employees.
On one of two recorded conversations, Foley complained that he was unhappy with his medical care and about being denied the right to die at home with “dignity.”
Instead of trying to improve his health care or offer him hospice, the unidentified worker on the recording urged him to “apply” for a hospital-assisted suicide.
Foley was told to “just apply to get an assisted, if you want to end your life, like you know what I mean?” by the man whom Foley recorded during the conversation.
Foley, who released the audio tapes this year, is suing the Ontario hospital and the Canadian government for a “lack of necessary care that is not being provided to persons who are suffering” and his hospital denying him the right to “live with dignity and live as independently as possible.”
But Foley also wants his situation to serve as a warning to “all Canadians” “before it is too late for my voice to be heard” about hospitals refusing to provide better medical care for dying patients or the right for them to die in hospice care.
“I have not received the care that I need to relieve my suffering and have only been offered assisted dying,” Foley said in a statement to CTV News. “I have many severe disabilities and I am fully dependent. With the remaining time I have left, I want to live with dignity and live as independently as possible.”
American leftists have often lauded the Canadian nationalized health care system as the model that the United States should adopt.
But Foley’s case calls this into question, and once again shows how cheap life has become in our era.
Hospitals, which were once about extending the life of dying patients or at the very least making them more comfortable, have now all-too-often become pro-suicide.
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