Killing Them SoftlyIt's lethal injection by house call in Belgium, where deaths by doctor are up 6,000 percent. We hit the road with one of euthanasia's most prolific practitioners
The doctor who’s preparing to kill his patient is wearing a Looney Tunes tie.
It is festive and patterned with miniature Bugs Bunnies, and he’s sporting crimson corduroys to match. In all, it’s an ensemble more suited for a rum and eggnog than the threatening needle he holds in his hands.
Standing beneath fluorescent lights, Dr. Marc Van Hoey and his colleague are arranging the implements of death. They fill three syringes, label each with a Sharpie and place them on a sterile silver tray.
Bedridden and tucked beneath his sheets, an 83-year-old man awaits their lethal cocktail. He appears relaxed and surprisingly upbeat. On his chart “12/18: Euthanasia Day” has been written in curling script, and according to the nurse, it’s the first time he has smiled in weeks.
A few months earlier, his eldest daughter had found him hanging from a rope. He was in the throes of stomach cancer and was unable to walk. His wife had died a few years before, and he intended to join her, but he wound up at Antwerp’s Nottebohm nursing home instead. He grew angry and threatened to leap from the window. He wanted death so desperately that it infected his dreams.
“When he woke up this morning he thought he was already dead,” remarks his nurse.
Despite the man’s apparent good cheer, the room is cast in a palpable gloom. His children and grandchildren stand huddled around his bed, and with the moment nearing, Van Hoey asks his patient if he would like his family to stay. “I don’t care,” he replies with a sarcastic quip. “I will be the first to leave.”
The man’s arm is limp and extended outwards over the edge of the bed. A catheter has already been taped to his forearm, and its tubing lodged tightly into a vein. “Are you ready?” the doctors ask. With a “yes” they begin the five-minute process.
Time slows as the doctors make their first injection, like a roller coaster nearing a drop. It is benzodiazepine, a sedative that weighs heavily on the patient’s eyelids and in moments has put him to sleep. He appears motionless, though raspy breaths are still resounding from his lungs. Next comes a noxious dose of anaesthetic—Thiopenal, a coma-inducing barbiturate that hits the body hard. The man rattles the room with a single, gut-wrenching gasp for air, and instantly ceases all movement. At this point, his mind has passed into blackness, and the doctors administer their final blow: Norcuron, a muscle relaxant used to stop the heart.
The family whimpers and cheeks grow wet with tears, their dry-humored patriarch gone suddenly stiff and white. His granddaughter fumbles nervously with a raggedy stuffed animal.
He was so peaceful,” one of his daughters says, hoping to dissolve some of tension in the room. “He was so happy. We are so lucky that he could go in this way.”
The nurse leads the family down the hall, and the doctors leave to fill out paperwork and wash their hands.
“That was emotional,” Van Hoey says to his colleague, peeling back his latex gloves.
For someone so frequently confronted with pain and suffering, Van Hoey is an inordinately lively man—though an upbeat attitude must be a necessary means of recourse. At 52, he is currently one of Belgium’s leading physicians when it comes to dealing out death, with somewhere close to euthanised 120 patients (he has lost track) under his belt so far. To put that number into perspective, it’s a body count that falls just shy of the notorious Jack Kevorkian’s.
Tall, with shortly cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Van Hoey is the president of Right to Die Flanders (RWS), a euthanasia advocacy group for Belgium’s Flemish-speaking population. It is one of many organizations around the world aiming to protect an individual’s right “to self-determination at the end of their lives.”
https://www.vocativ.com/01-2014/killing-softly/
