Originally Posted by TheSquealer

I went through this fairly recently...

A few months back, i went to see my grandfather (80yrs) who had lung cancer and likely less than a month to live. It was bad enough that doctors would not schedule any further appointments with him and just prescribed him enough pain meds to wipe out a small city. I used to live in his area and when i was in town would have dinner with them every Sunday evening just to spend time with them and we often met during the week for lunch. My grandmother had since passed and I had also moved away so I felt horrible about not keeping in touch as I should have. The honest truth is that he'd given up long before that when my grandmother died of Alzheimers and really didn't want to continue on. His life was not only miserable and he was chronically depressed but it was little more than trips to the hospital and waiting on test results, being poked, scraped etc etc etc almost daily. You could tell just by talking to him well before the cancer that he was done.

With the suicide part, he had already scheduled a date to do it and it gave me a week with him, so went to see him and i tried to just stay with him and hang out and talk.

What happened:

Basically, in the states where this is legal, I believe a panel of doctors have to sign off on it and the patient has to be terminal with little to zero time left. It's not an easy thing to do or to qualify for. The only reason they allow it is to skip the last week or two or three of agonizing, around the clock pain of some diseases/cancers before the patient dies. If you think about it, the death certificate needs to say "cause of death - cancer", not "cause of death - suicide" as that would nullify life insurance and have other possible legal consequences regarding the estate and subsequent settlements.

Once the doctors approved it, they approved a prescription which was to be picked up just like any other medication. It was Pentobarbital (the same thing that death row guy woke up from during his execution not too long ago). A guy from a volunteer organization picked it up, brought it to him to help him ingest it.

The day before, the fire chief of his town, police chief and a lot of friends were over and I was a little panicked as i started to think about the practical side of what was about to happen. Who is this "volunteer", "does he have medical training", "what if there si choking and 1/2 of it is spit back up... what the hell are you supposed to do", "what is everyone's obligation in terms of rendering aid if things don't go well" and so on. I asked the fire chief to have paramedics there just to deal with it so that bystanders wouldn't potentially be at risk (good Samaritan laws) and to just verify he had passed.

The fire chief said he wanted to come over with a bunch of people and cook a big breakfast at 7:30 as he'd planned to take this stuff by 10:00am.

A bunch of people came over, we all ate and talked and laughed just like any normal day. Finally, some odd little hippy who definitely did not have any medical training showed up with a little prescription bag. Some people said goodbye and left which was hard to watch. The guy told my grandfather that first he had to take a first medication to prevent vomiting. Then he'd have to wait 30 minutes. My grandfather was super irritated. He was irritated that the guy was 10 minutes late. He was really irritated that he had to wait another 30 minutes for the first meds to kick in. Watching that certainly made it clear that he was ready... not only ready but legitimately anxious to get on with it. You always wonder about people who have accepted their fate like this... walking to the electric chair, about to be beheaded by ISIS or whatever... how calm they are and if its shock or complete acceptance of whats about to happen. Its hard to really understand when you are not in that position, but he had not only completely accepted what was happening but had been anxiously awaiting this moment for a long time. It was a real mind fuck to witness.

In this time, almost everyone said goodbye and left. The few family that were there took a minute alone to say goodbye.

After 30 minutes passed, the volunteer guy poured water into a glass and mixed in the powder. He cautioned my grandfather that it tasted nasty and asked if he wanted to mix with with anything... beer, alcohol, juice or whatever. He said some people just sip it over the course of 10 minutes. My grandfather snatched the glass from his hand and sucked it down like it was a college drinking game. That image was really stunning and surreal.

And that was it. We just sat there and talked like nothing happened. Cracking jokes and then, after watching what felt to be one mind fuck after another and knowing whats going to happen in a matter of minutes right in front of me, something unbelievably surreal happened. There was a girl that lived next door with her family. She was about 20 or so, Vietnamese and had some relationship with my grandfather. The way he spoke, they spent a lot of time together. Anyway, at that moment, she walked up to the door in a kind of panic and with a big sigh of relief upon seeing him sitting there normally in his favorite choir, asked if everything was ok because she saw the cars and the fire chiefs car. To call my grandfather blunt, would be a gross understatement. He told her that he was checking out, right now, at this minute and said "goodbye". You could see the confusion on her face and as she looked around at everyone there, and there faces, you could see on her face that she was guessing what was happening. She hugged him and walked out the door crying and not knowing what to say.

He was just sitting there in his chair. 100% ok. He looked around and let out a big laugh. The fire chief asked "Whats so funny, Walt" and he said "I got all of you to come over here and stare at me"... then his head slowly nodded and in a few seconds it was apparent that he was unconscious. Over the course of about 10 minutes, his breathing got shallower and shallower until it stopped and his heart stopped. Everyone left and I was just sitting there looking at him, dead in his chair.

It was all very hard to process. Not the sad part of losing someone, but hard to process how it had happened. You want to help and you can't. You want to ease the pain and you can't. You want to give that person comfort and you can't. You want to fix it and you can't. No matter what you want or think, he's still going to die in a matter of days anyway, so that fact makes it a little weirder to process everything you are feeling.

Anyway, this isn't an easy thing to make happen for those who would like to. Its difficult and it has to be approved by the state after multiple doctors sign off on it. It's only legal in a few states and he claimed that he was number 183 or something like that to do it. So counting this girl, its probably less than 200 people who have done this in the US.

My opinion...?

The only reason its allowed is for a terminally ill patient to skip the last stage of extreme and persistent pain. So its irrelevant if they do it anyway, as most have 1-2-3 weeks maximum anyway.