Tag: Medical Assistance in dying

Okay, so I’ll talk a little bit about the procedure itself.

If I am approved, I hope to undergo the injection method as opposed to the oral method. Yes, both methods are supposed to result in a painless death, but I favour the injection method due to the swiftness.

Which ever method I’m allowed to undertake, I have to initiate it. Whether it’s drinking the glass of barbiturates or pressing the trigger button for the dosing pumps, it’s the patient undergoing the procedure that has to initiate the procedure.

With the oral method you consume a large amount of barbiturates in liquid form. This is supposed to induce unconsciousness and eventually cardiac arrest. Time to death varies from person to person. This is not the way I want to go. I can’t even stand most over-the-counter or prescription pain killers. And the idea of dying from a drug overdose doesn’t appeal to me.

The injection method is almost clinical in its efficiency and swiftness. There are three or four drugs used depending on the drugs selected.

The first drug to be introduced would be Midazolam. Midazolam is a sedative. This is not used to render the person unconscious. This is really just to make the person feel comfortable. Face it, no matter how intense the desire to die, when you’re lying down on your literal death bed with the cannula in your vein, anxiety can become your enemy.

The next drug to be introduced would be Propofol. Propofol is typically used prior to the administration of anesthesia in surgical procedures. For surgical procedures Propofol is usually administered at a rate of 2 mg/kg. In my case, if I was going for surgery I would get a dosage of about 180 mg. However, in the case of M.A.i.D. I would be receiving a doseof 1,000 mg. At this dosing level I will be put into a very deep coma and would lose consciousness and all sensation.

The third drug to be introduced would be Rocuronium. Rocuronium is a neuromuscular blocking agent that targets striated muscles. The Rocuronium would act upon my diaphragm and cease my breathing.

The final drug to be introduced would be Bupivacaine. Bupivacaine would cause cardiac arrest and stop my heart.

So basically the Midazolam is to calm me down prior to the Propofol. The Propofol is to shut my brain down so that I am unaware of the resulting asphyxiation and subsequent cardiac arrest. With the advent of cardiac arrest, arterial blood pressure in my brain would drop to nothing which means that even if the Propofol were to somehow wear off, I would never regain consciousness.

I’m not exactly sure how long after my heart stops before I will be pronounced clinically dead, but it wouldn’t be too long.

The interesting thing is, it won’t just be me dying. It will be P.S., Captain McRae, the man in the sauna, Captain Totzke, my father. There will be no more depression. There will be no more anxiety. There will be no more night terrors. There will be no more grinding my teether. There will be nothing.

I am an atheist.

I don’t believe in magical special friends or an invisible father figure peering down on me from the clouds.

I may be an atheist, but I’ve never had issues with my morals unlike men of the cloth like Captain Father Angus McRae or Brigadier General Roger Bazin.

Being an atheist means that I don’t believe the the great beyond, or the magical city in the sky. Conversely I don’t believe in the fire and brimstone pits of hell.

When I die, I will simply cease to exist.

Will I miss anything after I am dead? No, I’ll be dead.

Will I be sad when I die and will I be full of regret? No, I’ll be dead.

Life is not a competition to see who can live the longest.

You live the life you have.

You do the best with it that you can.

Life is not a miracle. There are over 7 billion people on the planet.

Society is weird in the sense that if I’m out riding my bicycle and I get hit by a car, “oh well, life goes on”. If I go snowboarding down a mountain and crash into a tree “Oh well, he died doing what he liked to do”. If I had developed a drug habit and died of a heroin overdose, everyone would be talking about how rough of a life I had and how it wasn’t fair that I died. Yet if someone undergoes severe psychological trauma society gets all sanctimonious if the topic of suicide or M.A.i.D. comes up. I can go scuba diving with the sharks or skydiving out of a perfectly functional airplane and society is fine with that. Struggle with the fallout from being sexually abused as a child on a military base, gotta keep on struggling. Apparently it builds character.

If this had been 40 years ago, just after the abuse but prior to Captain Totzke getting his hooks into my brain, yeah, maybe counselling or drug therapy could have worked.

I’m fifty years old in a few short days. I’ve had the events from CFB Namao playing back in my head non-stop since 1980. And I think the effect was made even worse by the fact that Captain Totzke and my father both blamed me for what happened and they both blamed me for allowing the babysitter to go after my younger brother.

So it’s not just the untreated trauma from sexual abuse that I’m dealing with, I’m dealing with the fucked up counselling from the military social worker that I receive back then and the scapegoating. Yes, the release of records by DND did vindicate me. But that doesn’t undo the damage done. In fact in some ways knowing that DND and the Canadian Forces knew the truth all along makes the pain even worse.

So, when do I intend to go to sleep?

Well, March 2023 would be the soonest.

But realistically it will probably be closer to 2025 or 2026.

I don’t know what the criteria will be or how many tests I would have to undergo. I would imagine that there would be more than a two question multiple choice questionnaire .

I don’t know if my current physician would be willing to prescribe me the medications or even cannulate me and connect the IV lines and the pumps. Even though I would have to push the button to initiate the process, my doctor would be the one who would have to insert the cannulas and be ready to do manual injections if something went wrong with the pumps. This might cause some physicians to not be willing to participate.

I would like to stick around a while to see what happens with my class action lawsuit. But I do fear that DND and the Department of Justice will try to drag this matter out for as long as possible in the courts. I have no intention of waiting 10 years.

Place of death? More than likely at home in my own bed. Lay down for one final sleep and never wake up again.

What happens after?

Hopefully I get to go to medical school or a body farm.

If I seem cavalier about death, it’s probably just that I refuse to be afraid of death.

The fact is everyone dies. Death is a normal part of life. There is no escaping death no matter how much you want to wish it away.

I don’t want my body pumped full of chemicals and stuck in the ground.

Send me to medical school and let the students learn.

Cut my brain apart and try to figure out why I never ended up on the streets with addiction problems.

Put me on a body farm and let the forensics investigators learn their techniques.

Okay, so I’m going to delve a little bit into the topic of M.A.i.D. and why I am hoping to be able to avail myself to this procedure.

Let’s face it. I’ve been through quite a lot in this life. And what I’ve been through has left me with some very significant long term psychological issues.

Major depression and severe anxiety would be the most significant issues that I struggle with. Yes, the medications that I am on now have calmed the storm, but the storm is still there. And the storm always will be.

Depression and anxiety have genetic roots. And if I had to say who I inherited what from I’d say that my depression came from my father’s genes and my anxiety came from my mother’s genes.

I went through 1-1/2 years of very depraved and graphic sexual abuse. I went through about 2-1/2 years of “counselling” with Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke, who was anything but concerned with my mental well-being and was more concerned with keeping the secrets of CFB Namao under wraps, even it that meant depriving me of the psychiatric care that I needed at the time.

My childhood was spent living in the household of a rage fuelled alcoholic with his own inner demons that he could barely deal with.

Because of the meddling of Captain Totzke, I have issues with gender identity and sexual orientation.

I have a lot of people living in my head, and none of them are pleasant. They keep coming back in unwanted flashbacks. If somebody touches me unexpectedly I react. I don’t like being touched. Period. And it’s very hard to be intimate with someone when you don’t like touching.

P.S., Captain McRae, the man from the sauna, Captain Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, they’re all up there. My father, Richard Gill is up there screaming and yelling about how I fucked with his military career.

I don’t like sex. I guess the lessons that I learnt from 9 to 11 was that sex was disgusting and wrong, just as I was disgusting and wrong for having done what I did on CFB Namao when I was 7 to 8.

Even though I now understand that the mess on CFB Namao was far larger than me apparently enjoying what the 15 year old babysitter was doing to me and in turn allowing the 15 year old babysitter to molest my younger brother, I can’t rewire my brain. Nobody can. There is no erasure procedure that will remove all of this crap.

I don’t want to learn how to deal with it or cope with it. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t want it, and it’s not up to me to live with it.

Death isn’t something that I’ve just begun to long for recently. It’s been with me since the days of CFB Namao.

The problem though is that no matter how much I really wanted to die, working up the will to follow through is something else.

I have come close in the past. You can’t go through what I did and not want to die. I know of two men who took their own lives due to the events on CFB Namao. How many others took their own lives we’ll never know. There is no way on Earth that the Canadian Armed Forces will go overturning the stones of history.

The closest I came was back in 1994. What stopped me was the image of P.S. and my father holding hands and laughing their heads off like they were buddies.

In the days and years after CFB Namao I must would frequently fantasize my own death and that after my death the police would investigate my father and off to jail he would go.

The more I learnt about suicide over the years, the less inclined I became to commit it. Most suicides are not successful, and if you think you’ve got problems prior to suicide, depending an how bad you botch things up, you’re going to have significantly more problems after.

Suicide is messy. And it’s often not quick. And it’s really not fair to those who discover you and who have to clean up the mess. And it often leaves those who knew you with all sorts of unanswered questions.

In the early aughts I started hearing of medically assisted suicide in places like Scandinavia and I was fascinated. Most if not all of the countries that offered medically assisted suicide didn’t often include depression. It wasn’t until the late aughts early ’10s that I started hearing about medically assisted suicide for depression.

But the reality always was that even if European and Scandinavian countries were allowing people to die who only had mental issues such as depression, there was no way I was going to be able to afford a flight over there.

So my hopes and desires kinda took a back seat.

And besides, I was just about to start discovering the whole rancid truth about CFB Namao and about who knew what back then. The more I learnt about CFB Namao, the more I decided that I needed to stay alive to at least clear my name and see this mess through to a conclusion.

In 2019, something in the Canadian media caught my eye. Due to a court decision in Quebec, the Government of Canada was expected to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to allow medical assistance in dying (M.A.i.D.) in circumstances in which the person requesting M.A.i.D. was experiencing pain, but was not near the expected terminal end of their life. Prior to this, M.A.i.D. could only be given if a person requested it and that person was expected to die naturally in the imminent future.

Parliament passed the amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada in March of 2021 to allow M.A.i.D. in cases where death was not imminent. However, what caught my attention was that the Senate, in reviewing the bill, had determined that to not allow a person suffering solely from psychiatric issues to request M.A.i.D. could be seen as a Charter issue.

Parliament has until March 17th, 2023 to pass the required legislation to allow M.A.i.D. for psychiatric issues such as depression.

Well, it’s now 2021. I’ve somewhat cleared my name. I know that the Canadian Forces knew full well what happened back in 1979 to 1980. I also know why it was buried.

I have a class action lawsuit that is heading before a justice in the spring of 2022. The class action came about due to the release of Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit investigation, both of with indicted that the military police in 1980 were full well aware of what P.S. was doing with younger children on the base and that it was Captain McRae that had taught P.S. and encouraged P.S. to behave in the manner that he did.

I don’t know what the rules will be in March of 2023. I can’t imagine it being something as simple as just walking into your doctor’s office and saying “Doc, I’m depressed, I want to die”. There will more than likely be a barrage of psychiatric tests and evaluations. I will probably have to convince the majority of a panel of at least 3 medical professionals that I am sane, competent, and that I am suffering.

If I succeed, then there will be all of the arrangements. I still don’t know what all of the details will be.

The next post will be M.A.i.D. pt 2