Opinion: I’m a doctor with end-stage cancer. I support medical aid in dying
When my suffering from stage 4 prostate cancer becomes unbearable, I hope to have the option of medical aid in dying.
I’m a doctor with incurable stage 4 prostate cancer. When my suffering becomes intolerable, I hope my doctors will permit me the option to end it peacefully with medical aid in dying — something I have been working to get explicitly authorized in Massachusetts, where I live. Medical aid in dying gives mentally capable, terminally ill adults with six months or less to live the option to request a prescription medication they can choose to take in order to end unbearable suffering by gently dying in their sleep.
When I was in my 40s, I watched my mother and my father-in-law suffer agonizing deaths from cancer. I remember thinking, “That’s not the
