The love of my life, Chris Davis, and I met as teenagers. We loved photography. We were planning our wedding. In January, we got some devastating news: Chris had bladder cancer.
What we envisioned as a time of picking invitations and enjoying our honeymoon turned into a quick courtroom wedding and a nightmare of hospital visits, chemotherapy, catheters, needles and machines.
Chris, my terminally-ill husband, was facing his imminent death at the young age of 29.
End of Life Option Act
The cancer spread like a rabid infestation and Chris wanted to use California’s End of Life Option Act. The law provides terminally ill adults the option of medical aid-in-dying to peacefully end their suffering, if it becomes unbearable.
Unfortunately, a hospital and a bureaucratic system denied my husband his final wish: to maintain some comfort in his final days, so that he could die gently instead of dying tragically like his grandmother, who had the same rare terminal cancer.
While medical aid in dying is legal in California, it can be very difficult to access.
At the end, doctors told Chris he had less than two weeks to live. That meant he would not survive the minimum 15-day waiting period between the first and second verbal requests for medical aid in dying that the End of Life Option Act requires for patients to access this end-of-life care option. As a result, my husband was denied a peaceful death.
Roadblocks
More than three out of four Californians (76%) support the End of Life Option Act. However, aspects of the law meant to act as safeguards, actually become roadblocks making it nearly impossible for dying Californians, like Chris, to access the law.
Doctors, by law, are not required to write prescriptions for medical aid in dying. Hospitals may also opt out and prohibit doctors affiliated with them from participating in the law as either an attending or consulting physician, so it can be difficult for doctors who want to support their dying patients.
Unfortunately, a religious hospital in Southern California that treated Chris forbids doctors from prescribing aid-in-dying medication. This hospital referred us to a hospice that misinformed us by wrongly saying it was illegal in California and then contradicted itself by saying that the only doctor who would offer to write a prescription was located in Northern California. Hospice officials also said Chris would most likely need two to six months to complete the entire process, when in fact a patient can get through the process in a minimum of 15 days.
Shame on them.
Every healthcare and hospice in California should ensure that they have all of the knowledge and tools they need to fully educate and support their patients of all end-of-life options. There is a wealth of information on the California End of Life Option Act that can be found on the California Department of Public Heath’s website, as well as on the website of Compassion & Choices, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering patients at the end of life).
Chris’ death
Chris died on June 19 exactly how he feared: With tubes draining various bodily fluids that protruded his stomach, kidneys and chest. His swollen skin was bursting from the pressure of edema.
I honored my husband’s life by attending a Day of the Dead celebration at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Diego Friday, Nov. 1. I will stood by Dan Diaz, who on that date commemorates the fifth anniversary of the death of his late wife, Brittany Maynard, the brave California woman who inspired me to come forward to advocate for medical aid in dying as an end-of-life option. Like Chris, Brittany was also 29-years-old.
Chris should not have suffered that way and neither should anyone else.
I encourage the medical community to fully inform themselves and their patients with accurate information regarding options for the end of life, and support them the way they want to be supported. Allowing the dying the option to pass peacefully in their final moments, rather than needlessly suffer, is not about politics, religion or preconceived judgments.
It is about humanity.
Amanda Villegas is a professional photographer who lives in Ontario.
