X-Message-Number: 8989
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 08:05:14 -0700
From: David Brandt-Erichsen <>
Subject: Oregon - hard to find a doctor

ASSOCIATED PRESS wire story
dated Jan 12/98 3:31 AM EST
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

DYING MAN FINDS LITTLE HELP IN OREGON ASSISTED SUICIDE LAW

   PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- A man dying of lung and kidney cancer could not
   find a doctor willing to help him end his life before it was too late,
   despite overwhelming voter reapproval of the nation's first
   assisted-suicide law.

   Ray Frank, 56, told his ex-wife, Noranne Clayton, in October that his
   doctor wanted him to consider an experimental treatment, but if didn't
   work, he wanted to die.

   At the time, the assisted-suicide law still was under a federal court
   injunction that had blocked it from going into effect pending a
   November vote on a measure to repeal it.

   Frank and his ex-wife talked about guns, but they decided against it.
   Noranne promised him that if he wanted her to, she would find a way to
   help him die, but she burst into tears after leaving his hospital
   room.

   Frank's daughter, Christina, was on a Portland State University
   internship in France when she got the call from Noranne. She took the
   first flight out.

   When Christina arrived home and saw her father, the twinkle was gone
   from his eyes. Everyone was trying to be optimistic and polite, but
   "my Dad was a totally different person. He was old. And I just kind of
   knew," she said.

   Christina had talked with her father about assisted suicide, and had
   agreed it should be considered.

   But her brother, Ed, and their mother, Regine Alquier, oppose assisted
   suicide. They believe that God chooses the time of death and would not
   let a person suffer unduly.

   Christina told her father that if he was considering
   physician-assisted suicide, he should not be afraid to talk to her
   about it. Ray had given Christina power of attorney for his health
   care, and told her he'd raised the subject with his doctor.

   In the second week in November, after voters reaffirmed the Death With
   Dignity Act, word came the court injunction had been lifted.

   Frank asked his doctor to help him die, but the doctor said he would
   not write Ray a lethal prescription, and suggested hospice care.

   But Frank feared he would be trapped, hooked up to morphine, until his
   body shut down.

   Noranne Clayton called doctors, one by one.

   "I have a friend with terminal renal cancer who is in great
   discomfort," she told each nurse she spoke to. "Do you have a doctor
   who can assist him in leaving his life?"

   The answer, though polite, was always the same: We can't help you.

   In desperation, she called her dog's veterinarian. She asked a dozen
   friends where she could get barbiturates. She got on the Internet and
   found numbers for right-to-die groups.

   One of Noranne's calls was to the right-to-die organization Compassion
   in Dying, whose executive director, Barbara Coombs Lee, found a doctor
   willing to help.

   But when Dr. Nancy Crumpacker met Frank and examined him, she did not
   think he would make it through the law's minimum 15-day waiting
   period.

   Only three times before, in her 15 years as an oncologist, had
   patients asked her to help them die. But she had been unable to do so.
   Frank was the first person to seek her help under the law.

   Frank was grateful, but just two days later, on Thanksgiving Day, he
   died, shortly after telling his daughter, "Do something."

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