CV NEWS FEED // After interviewing a woman who was offered physician-assisted suicide twice following her cancer diagnosis, a journalist has highlighted the dangers physician-assisted suicide poses in the Canadian health care system.
In 2022, British Columbia resident Allison Ducluzeau, then age 56, was diagnosed with stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, a severe abdominal cancer.
According to a May 30 article written Ian Birrell published on journalism outlet UnHeard, after Ducluzeau’s diagnosis, a specialist told her that she might only have a few more months to live, as chemotherapy would likely be ineffective, and she could not be operated on.
Following this diagnosis, she was recommended to consider choosing “medical assistance in dying,” also known as MAID.
“I could barely breathe,” Ducluzeau told Birrell. “I went in there hoping to come out with a treatment plan but was just told to get my will in order.”
“If I’d not had my children, I might have accepted MAID [medical assistance in dying] — but when I saw the effect on them, having just been through the deaths of my own parents, it made me dig really deep,” she added.
Ducluzeau began to search for ways to treat her cancer, and reached out to doctors in Taiwan, and later traveled to California and Baltimore before receiving a specialized operation after her support system of friends helped fundraise for it.
“Today, Allison is in remission,” Birrell wrote. “She lifts weights daily, and goes running and cycling.”
Throughout this journey to healing, she was offered MAID not once, but twice.
“The way it was presented was shocking,” Ducluzeau said, according to Birrell. “I was disgusted to be offered MAID twice. Once I was even on the phone, when I was on my own having just come back from Baltimore. It left me sobbing.”
She shared with Birrell that she does not have religious or ethical convictions against assisted suicide, but she is worried that Canada’s health care system should not currently offer such wide accessibility to MAID.
“We do not have a good standard of care here, especially for cancer — and that is why it is so dangerous to have MAID, especially when it can be used to take a bit of pressure off physicians and the government,” Ducluzeau said.
British Columbia’s health care system has waitlisted many cancer patients who need to be seen by specialists – something Ducluzeau herself experienced while seeking treatment.
Birrell wrote that a 67-year old grandmother named Samia Saikali, a resident in British Columbia, suffered from an aggressive cancer but was not seen by a specialist for over 10 weeks. She waited to be chosen to get an appointment, but eventually suffered excruciating pain as her illness worsened.
In 2023, she chose assisted suicide. She passed away on June 22, 2023.
In a December 2023 article by Global News, Saikali’s daughter Danielle Baker spoke about the circumstances leading up to her mother’s decision.
“Cruel to be given such a terrible diagnosis and then told to just wait and sit and wait,” Baker said. “And wait and wait to be picked. And knowing that every week my mom’s case was put on the table and maybe her outcome wasn’t the greatest, and maybe that’s why she wasn’t picked that week.”
Later she added, “I think the anxiety and just the, in her words, the inhumane treatment of having to sit in emergency to get these procedures, to try to get herself there. She was so depleted, she was in so much pain and she truly felt cast aside. She knew that it was too late for her and that she, you know, she couldn’t take it anymore.”
According to Birrell, in Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia, assisted suicide – or MAID – currently “accounts for almost one in 10 deaths.”
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“[Canada’s] annual MAID report also revealed that more than one-third of those choosing to die felt themselves a burden on family, friends or caregivers,” Birrell wrote. “Inevitably, there have been significant controversies with reports of pressurised fatalities involving disabled, elderly and impoverished citizens.”
Social scientist Christopher Lyon shared with Birrell that he watched his own father die from assisted suicide, which he said “was absolutely horrific.”
“It is horribly hard to see your father in distress being killed by a doctor with no attempt to help,” he said.
As debates about expanding access to assisted suicide continue in countries such as Britain, Lyon warned, “there is no doubt the evidence points towards a slippery slope with widening access — although it is really more of a cliff face. Ultimately, I doubt any assisted death system can be made safe.”
