Death With Dignity: A Case Study

Brittany Maynard graduated from the University of California Berkley with her masters in education. She was a world traveler and loved to volunteer with animals. She had been married for a year and was trying for a family when she was diagnosed with a grade two astrocytoma, a form of brain cancer, on January 1, 2014. It all started on when she was having terrible headaches and they just kept coming back. She was first told she had three to ten years to live. Nine days after her initial diagnosis she had a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of her temporal lobe, to stop the growth of her tumor. In April of that year, her tumor came back and more aggressive. It was now diagnosed as grade four glioblastoma multiform and she was told she had less

With months of research she came to the conclusion that no treatment could save her life, and the treatments recommended would destroy the time that she had left. She considered hospice in San Francisco, but with palliative care, her body would develop morphine resistant pain and she would suffer personality changes including verbal, cognitive and motor function loss. Considering that she was physically healthy, her body would hold on for a long time and she would suffer for weeks or months in hospice and her family would have to watch that. Brittany didn’t want that for her family. So in her research she found the Death With Dignity Act, and decided that it would be the best option for her. She then packed up and moved from California to Oregon. Since May of 2014, she has had the medications. She stated that she is not suicidal and doesn’t want to die, she just wants to die on her own terms when the pain is too much to handle. In an article for CNN Brittany said,“I would not tell anyone else that he or she should choose death with dignity. My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don 't deserve this choice? That I deserve to suffer for weeks or months in tremendous amounts of physical and emotional