Here’s how to find a California doctor who prescribes medical-aid-in-dying drugs

When my last day eventually comes hopefully not until I m or so I want to be in full control of my own death I do not want my last minutes on this agonizingly beautiful planet to be lost in a paralyzing morphine haze devoid of food and water diapered and gasping until various final crescendo where every system shuts down Ouch Eek No no no I ve heard from so numerous readers who feel the same way but even though death with dignity has been the law of the land in California for nearly a decade we remain mystified about how exactly to access this kind of care Hospitals can and do refuse to provide it on moral and religious grounds Doctors who object have no obligation to refer us to doctors who backing it And even with entire websites devoted to the law s intricacies finding an actual practitioner near you when you need it can be a confoundingly baffling exercise especially in the grief of the moment RELATED Even in California access to death-with-dignity drugs can be refused We re going to fix that at present In this story we ll direct you to medical-aid-in-dying assistance in California bookmark the pages in circumstance you need them someday We ll tell you what it s like from the physician s vantage point We ll tell you how it works and what to expect and we ll hope that we all pass peacefully in our sleep at and never need it Called to system In when the End of Life Option Act became law psychiatrist Jeff Levine was preparing for retirement He had watched broken-hearted and helpless as his father suffered through his final days not being able to do what he sought which was to get it over with Levine reported It s a horrible horrible feeling that I not long ago endured with my dad But Levine was in a position to do something about it Perhaps he thought he might be able to spare others that singular agony So he contacted Lonny Shavelson the Berkeley urgency room physician journalist who wrote A Chosen Death The Dying Confront Assisted Suicide back in and was a leading proponent of the new law Extraordinary portraits of five dying people who contemplate ending their own lives sensitively and movingly written by a physician who has thought long and hard about the issue of assisted suicide Kirkus Reviews noted of his book Brittany Maynard AP Photo Maynard Family Shavelson was organizing Bay Area colleagues to step up and fulfill the new law s promise Levine sought to do the same for Orange County and Southern California I started cold-calling doctors and got a horrible response he declared with something between a laugh and a wince We don t kill our patients Haven t you heard of the Hippocratic oath Why yes yes he had But sometimes the majority of humane and compassionate care a medical practitioner can give at the end of life is to help fulfill a victim s wish for the pain to stop California s lack of such a law in forced Brittany Maynard to leave her home in the East Bay for Oregon where death with dignity was legal She was only but had terminal brain cancer She feared pain personality changes and verbal cognitive and motor loss even with palliative medication Because the rest of my body is young and healthy I am likely to physically hang on for a long time even though cancer is eating my mind she wrote I likely would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months And my family would have had to watch that Maynard was the moral force pushing California s End of Life Option Act over the finish line in Levine had these conversations with medical professional after medical professional and unveiled an empathetic ear in Susan Gardner a friend of a friend She had in recent weeks retired after years as an urgency room physician in Los Angeles She had seen so multiple very elderly very sick people who were entirely put not allowed to die I love saving people she announced But for particular especially for a few very old people it was torture for them Literal torture But this new law was uncharted waters She worried She tried to say no to Levine numerous times but deep down knew how key the work was Let s just do one situation together Levine mentioned Just one Twist twist twist went the arm Reluctantly she agreed Scared Their first subject was a woman with metastatic breast cancer She was as the law requires terminally ill with less than six months to live She was as the law requires of sound mind when she made her first request for the drugs She was as the law required of sound mind when she appealed for the drugs again two weeks later Since then the period between the two asks has shortened to hours Interviews with patients typically start with a question designed to see how cognizant they are such as Do you understand why I m talking to you in the present day The answer is usually something like Yes You re the medical expert who s going to help me get medicine so I can die That s really what you want Why The answers are often a catalog of miseries debilitating pain that gets worse every day an acute inability to sleep tossing and turning through the night only to meet daylight with profound exhaustion difficulties eating and drinking mounting indignities They re just done Levine commented They don t want to do it anymore They know they re going to die and soon and they totally want to exert a little control over the bitter end to make it not quite so bitter There s reflection They ve had good lives people say They re grateful They re ready A combination of a cardiotonic opioid and sedative drugs is the the majority common prescription for medicinal aid in dying according to the California Department of Populace Fitness Patients usually drink it and it has to be self-administered which means literally no one is forcing their hand Their first client set a date Her whole family gathered a week beforehand to spend that time with her When the day eventually came everyone crowded into the room saying goodbye good night thank you I love you There were tears but the client was at peace Levine and Gardner however weren t quite exactly at peace It was honestly a bit scary Death does not come instantly It takes hours for the body to shut down The doctors made regular calls to Northern California to make sure that everything was unfolding as it should After the first hour or so the woman s family started telling stories Remember when There was laughter Soon there were jokes It wound up being an incredibly profound experience the doctors commented Chosen thought they were going on to a better place but multiple did not Would I have the courage Gardner mused It was very inspiring Peace of mind Sometimes patients were denied It wasn t clear their lives would end within six months or they were of sound mind when they began the process but not when it was time for next strategies And there were times though rare when the recipient demanded the drugs but family members were vehemently opposed Ugly things were noted The doctors had to calmly explain often to adult children that they weren t the victim their parent was Usually though those battles had been fought and settled long before the doctors entered the picture Often finding a medical practitioner to help was such an ordeal that families met them with gratitude and relief When the law took effect in June there were more than licensed physicians in California Only of them were writing prescriptions for medical-aid-in-dying drugs according to input from the state End of Life Act prescriptions by illness in the law s first six months California Department of Residents Fitness In the first six months people started the process Doctors wrote prescriptions Only people used them and died Since then the number of prescribing doctors has essentially doubled to but that s still an incredibly small fraction of California s licensed physicians And doctors can still be a challenge to find To make that easier Levine created a website to help people access help in Southern California socalendoflifeoptions com which is now run by another medical expert There s also the Academy of Aid In Dying Medicine at aadm org click on the For Patients and Families tab then Find a Provider You ll find a form there which will get you to a referral End of Life Act prescriptions by illness in California Department of Society Vitality If you or someone you love is in a hospital or hospice and you ask for medical-aid-in-dying drugs but are refused this happened to Marie-No le Anne Tusler at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in these information can direct you to the help you seek Meantime California s law is slated to sunset in a bill pending in Sacramento by Sen Catherine Blakespear D-Encinitas would extend it indefinitely The doctors will be watching They ve retired from their retirement work satisfied that they ve provided peace of mind to people at the culmination of life whether patients wound up using the prescriptions or not Mission accomplished Levine noted But his friends joke that he d better not die before they do