have to the terminally sick control how they die?

Brittany Maynard changed into dying of brain most cancers while she determined to drink a lethal prescription to give up her existence. She was just 29 years antique. Her choice made her a symbol in the debate approximately how much we should be capable of manage the time and manner of our own loss of life.

This isn't always euthanasia, when a doctor gives a affected person a deadly injection. it's illegal in all 50 states. resource-in-loss of life, or what warring parties call "assisted suicide" and supporters call "loss of life with dignity," relies on human beings taking the medication themselves. Oregon have become the primary kingdom to legalize it 18 years in the past, however because a nurse or physician is not often gift, it's remained ordinarily a personal affair, practiced behind closed doorways. We desired to listen from patients and family contributors who have skilled it and are combating to make it legal nationwide.

Brittany Maynard had been married much less than a 12 months when the headaches commenced. This MRI discovered a lethal mass -- it turned out to be brain most cancers so competitive docs gave her best six months to stay.

[Brittany Maynard, CBS News interview: All evidence points to the fact that this cancer will kill me.]

three weeks earlier than she died, Brittany, bloated by medication used to manipulate brain swelling, defined in an interview with CBS news why she was grateful to find a prison way to cease her life.

Brittany Maynard: Being capable of take a medication that permits me to slip into a nap in five minutes and skip away maximum probably in the 1/2 hour sounds a lot higher to me simply as a human being, as a daughter, as a wife. and i think it sounded better to my own family than analyzing approximately the alternative.

The opportunity, husband Dan Diaz says, changed into for Brittany to undergo weeks of agonizing decline.

Dan Diaz: Brittany said, "i'm now not afraid to die. At this point i am not scared of death. but i am frightened of being tortured to loss of life."

Dr. Jon LaPook: What did she suggest by way of being tortured, mainly? What turned into she frightened of?

Dan Diaz: So those signs that she knew become coming for her, the torture for her would've been dropping her eyesight and no longer knowing now who's within the room. I imply, the seizures had been awful enough because it become.

Dr. Jon LaPook: How about pain?

Dan Diaz: pain become simply constant.

however useful resource-in-death medicinal drug wasn't prison in their home kingdom of California. So in the spring of 2014, Brittany informed Dan it was time to percent up and head to Oregon...the nearest of 4 states in which it changed into prison. once she have become an Oregon resident, Brittany needed to make  verbal requests -- 15 days aside -- to a doctor, fill out this written form, and have two physicians verify she turned into mentally ready and anticipated to have much less than six months to live.

the medicine often prescribed is secobarbital. A barbiturate that during small doses reasons sleep, in massive doses, demise. right here in Oregon a affected person is available in with a prescription and gets a bottle of one hundred of those drugs. each one must be opened up personally and one at a time the powder poured into a tumbler and the contents dissolved in water.