Amanda shared her story in August of 2019. The following excerpt is from her op-ed My husband should not have suffered needlessly as he died, which first appeared in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin on November 1, 2019.
The love of my life, Chris Davis, and I met as teenagers. We loved photography. We were planning our wedding. In January, we got some devastating news: Chris had bladder cancer.
What we envisioned as a time of picking invitations and enjoying our honeymoon turned into a quick courtroom wedding and a nightmare of hospital visits, chemotherapy, catheters, needles and machines.
Chris, my terminally-ill husband, was facing his imminent death at the young age of 29.
The cancer spread like a rabid infestation and Chris wanted to use California’s End of Life Option Act. The law provides terminally ill adults the option of medical aid-in-dying to peacefully end their suffering, if it becomes unbearable.
Unfortunately, a hospital and a bureaucratic system denied my husband his final wish: to maintain some comfort in his final days, so that he could die gently instead of dying tragically like his grandmother, who had the same rare terminal cancer.
Read the rest of Amanda’s op-ed.
Read More:
LA Times: California lawmakers want to ease limits on state’s aid-in-dying law
California Healthline – “New California Law Eases Aid-in-Dying Process”
The Washington Post – Opinion: Medical aid in dying is for preventing a hideous death, not for truncating an unhappy life
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