Word: kevorkians
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...adversaries are right, one recent case shreds Kevorkian's safety net. In February, Kevorkian assisted in the suicide of Hugh Gale, 70, an emphysema patient who may, at the last minute, have changed his mind. ^ According to one version of the report that Kevorkian wrote, about 45 seconds after putting on the carbon-monoxide mask, Gale became flushed, agitated, saying "Take it off!" The mask was immediately replaced with oxygen, which helped calm him down. "The patient wanted to continue," the report states. "After about 20 minutes, with nasal oxygen continuing, the mask was replaced over his nose and mouth...
...fact, by his own, self-imposed rules, Kevorkian may have gone too far. In an article in the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry last year, Kevorkian sketched a hypothetical example of how a patient, "Wanda Endittal," and her doctors, "Will B. Reddy," "Frieda Blaime" and "Dewey Ledder" should proceed before a suicide: "If in any of her reviews, Wanda manifests any degree of ambivalence, hesitancy or outright doubt with regard to her original decision, the entire process is stopped immediately and Wanda is no longer -- and can never again be -- a candidate for medicide in the state of Michigan...
...Kevorkian's opponents also charge that without safeguards and consultations and thorough psychiatric evaluations, patients may seek out suicide not because of their disease, but because of their despair. Recognizing depression in dying patients is hard, since the culture ties the two together. Its symptoms of fatigue, loss of appetite, aches and pains mimic those of advanced cancer. "What Kevorkian's doing is killing people because they're depressed," says James Bopp Jr., an Indiana attorney who is president of the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent and Disabled. "But depression is curable. He takes absolutely no account...
...Kevorkian says that he always tries to talk people who come to him out of killing themselves. But some circumstances, he believes, produce the mental anguish that may justify suicide. "You can't dope up a quadriplegic," he argues. "There's no pain to alleviate, but the anguish in the head is immense, especially after five or 10 years of lying on your back looking up at the ceiling." He says he would love to debate the critics who charge that he is too hasty in deciding who may die. "I will argue with them if they will allow themselves...
Somewhere between the prospect of a slow death in intensive care and a quick death at the hands of a doctor lies the vast middle ground. It is this middle ground, his critics charge, that Kevorkian in his single-minded focus on death, too often fails to explore. "Our experience says the great majority of the time these people are lonely, isolated and actually in need of better medical care rather than somebody to euthanatize them," says Harris of the American Academy of Medical Ethics...