That sound – the pain and lack of dignity it signified – horrified my mother-in-law. She was determined to avoid her former patient’s fate. As she herself grew older,she became a devotee of Dr Rodney Syme,Victoria’s chief advocate for a controlled death,and of the concept of Voluntary Assisted Dying,long before it was the law. She badgered us,her family,never to allow her to reach the state of her former patient.
So when her terminal lung cancer diagnosis came last year and her condition began to worsen,she sought out the lethal dose permitted under Victorian law and,like604 people have done in the three years since a new law was introduced in 2019,imbibed it. At 82,gratefully,she slipped into unconsciousness and never woke up.
Syme,one of the godfathers of Australia’s VAD regime,died himself in 2021. His final years were spent writing an as-yet unpublished book and nursing his wife,Meg,through the horrors of dementia. Just four months after she finally succumbed,Syme had a catastrophic stroke and died himself.
One of his own final wishes,expressed in his manuscript,was that VAD be extended to the frail aged who believe they’ve had what he called a “completed life”,and to those dying of dementia.
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In his manuscript he describes being taken to see a woman living in a nursing home with late-stage dementia. Syme wrote that “Mrs V” was immobile,half her previous body weight,her limbs curled in on themselves. Her flexor muscles had overcome the weaker extensors so powerfully that her fingers pushed hard into her palms and were in danger of lacerating the skin.
Her mouth was agape,her eyes wide open but blank. She was doubly incontinent and had a bedsore the size of a small plate,eroded down to the bone due to immobility and long hours lying in her own waste.