Dying with Dignity
I've been a supporter of the SNP in recent years, but I do wish they would stop banging on about independence all the time and show more effective leadership on the big issues of the day including the right to die with dignity.
Richard Selley is clearly of sound mind, enjoys the loving support of his family and has made a perfectly logical choice to end his life at a time of his own choosing.
Surely it's not beyond the wit of Scotland's politicians to devise a scheme, with proper safeguards, that would allow someone like Richard to fulfil his dying wish?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/richard-selley-my-legal-fight-to-be-allowed-to-die-dr22rnc3w?shareToken=2a29bc919a953cbc2d9acdad7226f93e
Richard Selley: My legal fight to be allowed to die
By Helen Puttick - The Times
Richard Selley, who has motor neurone disease, says his wife, Elaine Logan, cannot help him to plan for fear of prosecutionTIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP
The former head teacher of a Scottish private school is to end his life at a clinic in Switzerland as he enters the final stages of motor neurone disease.
Richard Selley, 65, is preparing to travel to the Dignitas clinic in eight weeks’ time to take a fatal prescription.
Legal obstacles threatened to derail the journey after lawyers warned his GP against providing medical records that proved the severity of his illness. Without these the clinic will refuse an assisted dying application.
Mr Selley, who can no longer speak and communicates by typing on an iPad, has had to retrieve his medical records by other means and arrange the Swiss procedure alone for fear that involving his wife, Elaine Logan, would lead to her prosecution.
He described the process as exhausting and stressful. “I am trapped in a body that refuses to respond to messages from my brain, a body that has been drained of energy. The only thing that I can do for myself is type, very slowly, with one finger. In March I decided that I did not wish to live in that state so I became a member of Dignitas.
“Elaine said she did not want to lose me but gave me her full support. Telling my daughters was painful but they also gave me their backing.”
Mr Selley was head of Loretto junior school in East Lothian for eight years. Until recently his wife, 57, was warden — or head teacher — of a prestigious boarding school, Glenalmond College in Perth. The couple still live in a house on site which has been adapted for Mr Selley’s motorised wheelchair.
He is waiting to receive the green light from Dignitas after submitting the required information and plans to die in early September. Motor neurone disease (MND), an incurable condition that attacks the nerves that control movement, was diagnosed in 2015. He can no longer walk, speak or swallow.
In his blog Mr Selley said that he reached a turning point this year when he could no longer lift a spoon to his mouth to eat yoghurt and honey. MND, he said, had robbed him of his independence and he had cried uncontrollably, but by planning to use Dignitas he had “some control back”.
During the last weeks of his life he intends to campaign with the organisation Dignity in Dying and help to persuade Holyrood to legalise assisted dying in Scotland. He contacted his MSP, Roseanna Cunningham, hoping to meet her to discuss the issue, but she said that she was “opposed to assisted dying in principle” and an increased focus on palliative care should be the priority.
“She misses the point,” Mr Selley said. “My palliative care has been wonderful. It is not a choice between palliative and assisted dying. If she spent just one day in my shoes I believe she would change her mind on this.”
Writing in The Times today, he says: “If assisted deaths were available in Scotland it would have eased many worries and my remaining time would have been dedicated to my wife, family and friends rather than complex admin.”
He and his wife, who have been married for eight years, have five children between them, aged 19 to 39. Ms Logan, who is on compassionate leave, said: “I think the law in Scotland creates more stress, especially when your partner wants control. I would much prefer him to pass away in this country safely and to have the choice here.
“The thought of taking him on a plane to a foreign country where we do not know anyone, it is like a business transaction. It is tough.”
Alyson Thomson, director of Dignity in Dying Scotland, said: “Without safe and compassionate assisted dying laws in Scotland we are living with a broken law and outsourcing the problem to Switzerland.”
Gordon MacDonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, which opposes euthanasia, said no major disability rights organisation or doctors’ group supported legal change. He added: “The safest law is the one we have, which gives blanket prohibition on all assisted suicide. It deters exploitation and abuse but at the same time gives some discretion to prosecutors and judges to temper justice with mercy in hard cases.”
Help at home ‘would mean the world’
Every night Richard Selley practises his death. The muscles in his arms kept working as motor neurone disease stole his mobility and his speech, but now they are weak. If he wants to fulfil his plan to end his life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland he needs the strength to administer the fatal drug.
This is the point he has reached six years after a glass of beer slipped through his fingers — the first sign that anything was wrong.
Speaking through a voice synthesiser, he said: “Discovering that I had a progressive disease for which there is neither a cure nor treatment was devastating. At first I felt numb, then for the first time in my adult life I cried uncontrollably.” In the early stages of his illness he wrote a book, Death Sits on My Shoulder.
Mr Selley did not at first want to die, however. Last September when a cold turned into a chest infection he took antibiotics, wanting to live because his daughters were due to visit.
He fills his days watching sport or the squirrels scurrying across the lawn, receiving friends and keeping up with politics. “Living with Boris as PM does not appeal,” he joked. It is too painful thinking about good times gone “or the bleak future”, so he tries to stay in the moment.
“I am clear in my own mind that what I am planning is right for me,” he said. But if his death could have been assisted in his own home in Scotland it would have “meant the world”. Instead Mr Selley, struggling for breath, says that he faces “a difficult plane journey and a premature death abroad”.
No crime, but prosecution is a risk
In Scotland assisting a suicide is not a specific crime, but helping someone to die could lead to prosecution.
When Gordon Ross, from Glasgow, who had Parkinson’s disease, went to the Court of Session seeking clear guidelines from the lord advocate on the matter in 2016 his argument was rejected.
For doctors, the General Medical Council’s code on helping patients to end their lives applies UK-wide.
Writing in 2011, the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland said that its advice to medical professionals was to “exercise real care when considering requests for medication, medical reports or copies of medical records where there is a suspicion that the purpose of the requests is to gain the means or information with which to assist a patient’s suicide”.
Today, with a growing number of harrowing cases, the House of Commons is due to debate the functioning of the present law on assisted dying.
Two bills to introduce assisted dying in Scotland have been rejected by Holyrood.
Scotland on Sunday carried an interesting article on a visit to the Scottish Parliament to discuss Canada's system for providing medical help for citizens who wish to choose an 'assisted death'.
Read the full piece via the link below.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/assisted-dying-only-option-for-many-with-terminal-illness-1-4844665
Assisted dying ‘only option for many with terminal illness’
The former head teacher of a Scottish private school is to end his life at a clinic in Switzerland as he enters the final stages of motor neurone disease.
Richard Selley, 65, is preparing to travel to the Dignitas clinic in eight weeks’ time to take a fatal prescription.
Legal obstacles threatened to derail the journey after lawyers warned his GP against providing medical records that proved the severity of his illness. Without these the clinic will refuse an assisted dying application.
Mr Selley, who can no longer speak and communicates by typing on an iPad, has had to retrieve his medical records by other means and arrange the Swiss procedure alone for fear that involving his wife, Elaine Logan, would lead to her prosecution.
He described the process as exhausting and stressful. “I am trapped in a body that refuses to respond to messages from my brain, a body that has been drained of energy. The only thing that I can do for myself is type, very slowly, with one finger. In March I decided that I did not wish to live in that state so I became a member of Dignitas.
“Elaine said she did not want to lose me but gave me her full support. Telling my daughters was painful but they also gave me their backing.”
Mr Selley was head of Loretto junior school in East Lothian for eight years. Until recently his wife, 57, was warden — or head teacher — of a prestigious boarding school, Glenalmond College in Perth. The couple still live in a house on site which has been adapted for Mr Selley’s motorised wheelchair.
He is waiting to receive the green light from Dignitas after submitting the required information and plans to die in early September. Motor neurone disease (MND), an incurable condition that attacks the nerves that control movement, was diagnosed in 2015. He can no longer walk, speak or swallow.
In his blog Mr Selley said that he reached a turning point this year when he could no longer lift a spoon to his mouth to eat yoghurt and honey. MND, he said, had robbed him of his independence and he had cried uncontrollably, but by planning to use Dignitas he had “some control back”.
During the last weeks of his life he intends to campaign with the organisation Dignity in Dying and help to persuade Holyrood to legalise assisted dying in Scotland. He contacted his MSP, Roseanna Cunningham, hoping to meet her to discuss the issue, but she said that she was “opposed to assisted dying in principle” and an increased focus on palliative care should be the priority.
“She misses the point,” Mr Selley said. “My palliative care has been wonderful. It is not a choice between palliative and assisted dying. If she spent just one day in my shoes I believe she would change her mind on this.”
Writing in The Times today, he says: “If assisted deaths were available in Scotland it would have eased many worries and my remaining time would have been dedicated to my wife, family and friends rather than complex admin.”
He and his wife, who have been married for eight years, have five children between them, aged 19 to 39. Ms Logan, who is on compassionate leave, said: “I think the law in Scotland creates more stress, especially when your partner wants control. I would much prefer him to pass away in this country safely and to have the choice here.
“The thought of taking him on a plane to a foreign country where we do not know anyone, it is like a business transaction. It is tough.”
Alyson Thomson, director of Dignity in Dying Scotland, said: “Without safe and compassionate assisted dying laws in Scotland we are living with a broken law and outsourcing the problem to Switzerland.”
Gordon MacDonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, which opposes euthanasia, said no major disability rights organisation or doctors’ group supported legal change. He added: “The safest law is the one we have, which gives blanket prohibition on all assisted suicide. It deters exploitation and abuse but at the same time gives some discretion to prosecutors and judges to temper justice with mercy in hard cases.”
Help at home ‘would mean the world’
Every night Richard Selley practises his death. The muscles in his arms kept working as motor neurone disease stole his mobility and his speech, but now they are weak. If he wants to fulfil his plan to end his life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland he needs the strength to administer the fatal drug.
This is the point he has reached six years after a glass of beer slipped through his fingers — the first sign that anything was wrong.
Speaking through a voice synthesiser, he said: “Discovering that I had a progressive disease for which there is neither a cure nor treatment was devastating. At first I felt numb, then for the first time in my adult life I cried uncontrollably.” In the early stages of his illness he wrote a book, Death Sits on My Shoulder.
Mr Selley did not at first want to die, however. Last September when a cold turned into a chest infection he took antibiotics, wanting to live because his daughters were due to visit.
He fills his days watching sport or the squirrels scurrying across the lawn, receiving friends and keeping up with politics. “Living with Boris as PM does not appeal,” he joked. It is too painful thinking about good times gone “or the bleak future”, so he tries to stay in the moment.
“I am clear in my own mind that what I am planning is right for me,” he said. But if his death could have been assisted in his own home in Scotland it would have “meant the world”. Instead Mr Selley, struggling for breath, says that he faces “a difficult plane journey and a premature death abroad”.
No crime, but prosecution is a risk
In Scotland assisting a suicide is not a specific crime, but helping someone to die could lead to prosecution.
When Gordon Ross, from Glasgow, who had Parkinson’s disease, went to the Court of Session seeking clear guidelines from the lord advocate on the matter in 2016 his argument was rejected.
For doctors, the General Medical Council’s code on helping patients to end their lives applies UK-wide.
Writing in 2011, the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland said that its advice to medical professionals was to “exercise real care when considering requests for medication, medical reports or copies of medical records where there is a suspicion that the purpose of the requests is to gain the means or information with which to assist a patient’s suicide”.
Today, with a growing number of harrowing cases, the House of Commons is due to debate the functioning of the present law on assisted dying.
Two bills to introduce assisted dying in Scotland have been rejected by Holyrood.
Dignity in Dying (17/12/18)
Scotland on Sunday carried an interesting article on a visit to the Scottish Parliament to discuss Canada's system for providing medical help for citizens who wish to choose an 'assisted death'.
Read the full piece via the link below.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/assisted-dying-only-option-for-many-with-terminal-illness-1-4844665
Assisted dying ‘only option for many with terminal illness’
Canadian Medical Association president Sandy Buchman and vice-president - Photo Jeff Blackmer
By SCOTT MACNAB - Scotland on Sunday
The introduction of assisted dying in Scotland is coming and is the only way to “relieve the suffering” for many with terminal conditions, MSPs have been told.
Medical leaders from Canada were in the Scottish Parliament last week to set out how the medical assistance in dying (MAID) system has worked there since being introduced two years ago and how splits in the profession were overcome.
Dr Sandy Buchman, president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), and a practitioner of MAID in Toronto, said the dilemma for physicians is “as difficult as you can get” in medicine. But he told MSPs: “I’ve learned from clinical experience that sometimes the only way to alleviate a patient’s suffering is to allow them to choose an assisted death.”
He addressed an event at Holyrood last week organised by Dignity in Dying Scotland which is campaigning for the measure to be brought back before the Scottish Parliament, after being twice rejected in recent years. MSPs from across the political spectrum attended.
Sir Graeme Catto, a former chair of the General Medical Council (GMC), told the meeting that the measure will eventually be introduced in Scotland and the rest of the UK – but advocates must win over “hearts and minds”.
