Read it at The Rumpus.
Twenty-one years ago my mother stopped her dialysis treatments before they’d barely begun, a decision that prematurely ended her life.
It was her right, if one that patients rarely assert, and therefore morally, medically, and existentially unique. With physician-assisted suicide, a doctor supplies knowledge about how to die, or the means to do so, or both. In cases where a loved one has fallen into a persistent vegetative state, family members must choose whether to discontinue life support. But voluntary death by kidney failure, especially in the absence of other, imminently fatal illnesses, requires only an individual’s will.
Read more here.
