Whose Death Is It Anyway? Perspectives on End-of-Life in Canada (2 high-profile Canadian physicians)

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...One week after a CT scan revealed he had a midbrain tumour, Dr. Donald Low began talking with his wife, Maureen Taylor, about assisted dying. As an internist and microbiologist for almost 40 years, Low knew the tumour was virtually untreatable, and that the end would be messy. While he allowed his physicians to steer him towards a biopsy, a ventriculoperitoneal shunt, chemotherapy and radiation, he never let himself or his family be lulled into a sense of false hope. For seven months, Low and Taylor researched the means that would provide him with a peaceful death, in his own home, at the time of his choosing. But even with Low’s connections in the international medical community, and despite his access to potent drugs, Low died the death he feared: paralyzed, unable to communicate with his family, sedated so that he could tolerate the intolerable. 

Why make people suffer for no reason, when there’s an alternative? asked Low in a video interview taped eight days before his death (Cancer View Canada 2013). A lot of clinicians have opposition to dying with dignity. I wish they could live in my body for 24 hours, and I think they would change that opinion. 

While Low was dealing with his terminal brain cancer in the winter and spring of 2013, his Mount Sinai Hospital colleague, Dr. Larry Librach, was even closer to death. One of Canada’s leading palliative care specialists, Librach died of pancreatic cancer in August, peacefully and at home, according to his family. Although he advocated for improved palliative care for all patients at the end of life, and would not have chosen an assisted death for himself, Librach believed that palliative care would not suffice for a minority of dying people. 
Even before his own diagnosis, Librach was an expert witness at the British Columbia Supreme Court in a legal challenge to the prohibition against medically assisted suicide. There were several plaintiffs, including Gloria Taylor, a B.C. woman suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Librach later told CTV News (2013), “The best of palliative care will still not prevent people, like Gloria Taylor, from saying, that’s great, but I still want control over the end of my life. And I don’t see that there’s any ethical or other reason why we shouldn’t allow that when there are appropriate safeguards.” ......