The Doctor as Serial Killer

Posted on January 18, 2006 in Crosstalk Medical Ethics Suicide

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The word that the Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law wrenched out my heart and threw it into Jack Kevorkian’s meat grinder. Imagine! The doctor as serial killer! No thank you.

Shrinkette shares her experience speaking about suicide with the local chapter of the Hemlock Society:

….they pry a tortured statement from my lips: If conditions are truly as they’ve described them…then they each have an important message that deserves to be heard, and respected. Ah! The relief in the room! They’re beaming. The sandwiches are here; let’s eat!

Their leader clasps my hand. “They love you!” he says. (Mike whispers, “Shrinkette, they want you to kill them.”)

Gotta love Mike!

I suffer from mental illness, a heart condition, asthma, gout, and diabetes. The pain often seems unendurable. Aspects of my disease do not presently respond to treatment. I live wondering if tomorrow I will be depressed or manic. I know what I am capable of. I am the subject of stigma from those not afflicted with my disease and I ache when I read or hear the stories of others who have lost the love of their families and friends due to fear, loathing, and plain old meanness.

People tell me that they’d understand why I might want to commit suicide. They have no freaking clue about either life or death.

Jack Kevorkian’s last victim was mentally ill. Yet old Kevorkian went through the motions of setting up the machine, showing the man how to connect it, and delivering his body to a hospital in the aftermath. That incident showed quite clearly that Kevorkian was nothing more than a serial killer: he liked murder and he liked the immunity that being a doctor gave him before jury after ignorant jury.

If any doctor of mine started performing physician-assisted suicides, I’d fire her or him.

A commentator at Shrinkette’s site says:

I’m not trying to trivialize this, but every pet owner goes through this with a suffering animal who can’t really tell us what’s going on, and you have to make the decision based upon a best guess for what tomorrow will be like.

That is trivializing the matter. I am not a dog. And for the sake of my sanity, I do not predict what tomorrow will be like.

I look at this news and sigh. One more thing to stick in my advance directive: No physician-assisted suicide. Period. Let me die as Time will have me die.