It was the hospice chaplain, Marc said, who took him aside and told him to look up Dr. When Marc called the hospice chain that managed Bradshaw’s care, a social worker explained that while the company respected Bradshaw’s choice, its doctors and staff members were prohibited from prescribing drugs in aid-in-dying cases. It seemed to him that Bradshaw met the requirements: terminal illness, less than six months to live, mentally competent.īradshaw said he had already asked his nurses, twice, about speeding up his death, and that each time the nurses had said that they couldn’t talk about it, because it was against their religion. Marc found a page describing the California End of Life Option Act, which had passed in 2015 and legalized medical aid in dying across the state. And right there, he took out his phone and Googled assisted dying + California. “But I think I am done needing help.” Bradshaw told Marc that he had lived a good life, but that after 89 years, the bad was worse than the good was good. Marc was in the room and thought he saw his father smile. In May 2018, doctors told Bradshaw that he likely had just two or three months left to live. “He always claimed he was never depressed and that it wasn’t an issue. Marc wasn’t sure if his father had really meant to die that day. Later he would claim that he’d sat in the driver’s seat for an hour, waiting to die, but that nothing had happened. Three years earlier, when Bradshaw was living with Marc and growing sicker, he had tried to gas himself to death in the garage. When his son Marc came to visit, he would find his father staring at the wall. At the nursing home just outside Sacramento, California, where the retired veteran had lived for more than a year and had been happy enough-watching TV, eating takeout KFC, flirting with his nurses-he had grown restless, bored, and despairing of the hours before him. In the past few years, the disease had spread with a kind of berserk enthusiasm from Bradshaw’s prostate to his lungs and into his bone marrow. “I have a patient,” the doctors would say. Sometimes, Shavelson told me, he got quiet phone calls from doctors at Catholic health systems. He would say that this had little to do with him and more to do with the fact that other doctors refused to perform assisted deaths, or were forbidden to do them by the hospitals and hospices where they worked. Everyone said that no doctor in California did more deaths than Shavelson. This would be Shavelson’s 90th assisted death. “It’s the prelude to the final attraction,” he said at last. Someone had combed his gray hair back, away from his forehead, and he wore a brown T-shirt over age-spotted arms. Do you remember that I’m the doctor who is here to help you die?”īradshaw blinked again. ![]() “You don’t know who I am yet, because you’re still waking up,” Shavelson said, buoyantly. blinked and stared vacantly at the doctor. ![]() “Bradshaw,” he said gently, looking down at the old man lying under the covers. They all stood stiffly by the doorway, and Shavelson hugged each of them: the three grown children, the grandson, the puffy-eyed daughter-in-law, and the stocky, silent friend. But first, there were loved ones to greet. He would start by pulling the hospital bed away from the wall, so that anyone who wanted to touch the patient as he died would have easy access to a hand or an arm or a soft, uncovered foot. It was small and stuffy and there weren’t enough chairs. Lonny Shavelson thought when he stepped into the room was This is a bad room to die in.
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