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A Dying Request of Rita Castellano to the California State Assembly: Please Pass AB 374
[Editor's note: AB 374 passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee yesterday and will be up for a vote by the full Assembly next week]
By Rita Castellano
My name is Rita Castellano. I am 73 years old and have wide spread metastasized cancers.
Before talking about myself, though, I want to illustrate the torturous dying processes of just the last two of six family members whose agonies I have watched.
Since my May contact with assembly representatives, my sister- in hospice care- has deteriorated to the point where she needs mechanical aids to move her. She has continual diarrhea. Her body is swollen; she is experiencing kidney failure and involuntary muscle spasms. Rapid increases in painkillers are not relieving her. She has repeated adamantly that she wants to die now rather than be forced to continue deteriorating. Because there is no legal relief, she has chosen a horrendous course. She keeps biting her tongue and cheeks, minimizes her intake of food and water, and refuses antibiotics, stroke, heart and blood pressure medications. She says she’s trying to induce another stroke and heart attack. Is this a humane option for someone already under immense biological stress?
My husband was a brilliant academician who unfortunately remained mentally alert while suffering fevers, chills and sporadic heart stoppages during the last two days of his life. In spite of his clearly stated wish to die in a hospital, his oncologist refused, arguing that Fred was better off dying at home. He was not. I was alone with him those last days, unable to help him and without the “powerful pain relieving drugs” he was supposed to receive. How abandoned, helpless and hopeless I felt. To this day I wonder what he felt. Compassionate medical support is so necessary for both patient and loved ones in the final days and hours.
Now I must anticipate my own death. Within the past month, the bilateral breast cancers that metastasized throughout my body have increased their control of my life, gifting me with skull pressure pain that is my constant companion and making me handmaiden to diarrhea and exhaustion. Yet I still enjoy life and want to continue it as long and as actively as possible. But when my death is within weeks or days, I want the autonomy to choose when I have had enough without biting my tongue and cheeks, without starving and dehydrating myself and WITH the understanding of cautious caring legal medical aid that is NOT hindered by circuitous prolonged procedures.
AB 374, the compassionate aid in dying bill, with its stringent time and medical requirements, can be the most humane protection for those of us who wish to choose our individual dying processes without violent suicide or awful body mutilation. If abandoned by physicians and legislators at the time when help is most desperately sought, what other recourse do we have?
Who will protect the rights of all of us from a Pope who has for years stifled liberated ideas, made sweeping threats of excommunication and encouraged churches to hand out pamphlets after Sunday masses? One pamphlet distributed last Sunday warned, “Destroying human life is degrading and immoral.” Degrading to whom? To one who is struggling to breathe? To carry out essential body functions even with mechanical aids? To one in convulsive death throes? Parishioners were told not to be “fooled” by catch phrases - yet the pamphlet’s title is “VOICE OF HOPE.” For those of us dying, being forced to suffer is degrading, immoral and void of hope.
I ask you as legislative representatives; can you in good conscience decide MY final fate based on the dictates of some vocal followers of a religious ideology? If statistical reports are valid and reliable, will you vote according to the voice of the majority (Catholics included) who support this type of bill? I hope you will be as strong as those of us dying. We need your help and that of the medical profession.
As a dying request, I urge you to vote for the protection of those most in need of your support.
Vote in favor of AB374.
Thank you.
Comments
What a wonderful and caring lady. I wish you well and appreciate your wish to help others. I too have seen loved ones experience these horrible and painful deaths. This compassionate bill will ease the misery of those who choose it. No one is forcing anyone who chooses to suffer to use this method of dying. The choice to do so is theirs and theirs alone. Having that choice is what is important. I will never understand why a Pope would take the stance he is taking. I was raised Catholic, but they have not progressed with society and that's a shame.
Please vote yes on this bill. Make it a law that we have a choice.
Posted by: Morris1 at June 1, 2007 10:16 AM
please pass
ab374
Posted by: Stan Goodstein at June 2, 2007 03:14 PM
I just read Rita Castilano's article and it has helped me alot. I have just been diagnosed with Pulmonary fibrosis which is terminal within 3 to 6 years of diagnosis. I have been looking for ways to accept this and ways to prolong my life, Oxygen being the only thing for me so far. I am lucky for no pain except when badly out of breath and the lungs are really trying to work. I am looking for ways to accept my future and want to help my children to cope as they lost two brothers when they were all grown and I am sure this will be hard on them too. I want to find ways to let them know it's OK. I am not afraid, I just don't to go any time soon as I am in really good shape otherwise. This article will help alot near the end I hope. Thank you for it.
Posted by: Elizabeth Davis at July 8, 2007 10:44 PM
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