As assisted suicide and euthanasia grow more pervasive in Canada, people are suffering more — with one woman’s cancer horror story as the latest example.
Allison Ducluzeau spoke to Global News about her experience, in which she sought treatment for cancer and was told by her doctors that treatment wasn’t worth it. When she originally began having abdominal pain, she said it took her a long time to even be seen for diagnostic tests.
“In November, I ended up at emergency because the pain was just getting progressively worse,” she said. “I didn’t get to sleep one night and I woke up my now husband and said, I think we better go to emergency. So we did. And when I was there, I got a CT scan or I was booked for one the next day and the results of the CT scan indicated it looked like it might be something called peritoneal carcinomatosis, which is abdominal cancer.”
Eventually, she was able to get a biopsy, in which the cancer diagnosis was confirmed: stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis.
Ducluzeau was referred to the BC Cancer Agency, and had already been given a treatment plan by her family doctor, who suggested HIPEC, high doses of chemotherapy delivered into the abdomen to kill the cancer cells. But the surgeon at BC Cancer Center said that because her prognosis was not good, it wasn’t even worth trying — and recommended Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), Canada’s euthanasia program, instead.
“Chemotherapy is not very effective with this type of cancer,” Ducluzeau said the surgeon told her. “It only works in about 50 per cent of the cases to slow it down. And you have a life span of what looks like to be two months to two years. And I suggest you talk to your family, get your affairs in order, talk to them about your wishes, which was indicating, you know, whether you want to have medically assisted dying or not.”
After telling her devastated children the news, Ducluzeau vowed to fight, consulting oncologists in Taiwan and Maryland. By the time she heard back from an oncologist in Canada, she’d already begun receiving treatment in the United States.
“I had to fly to California to get one of my diagnostic scans done there, a PET scan, because I wasn’t getting in here and I had to pay to have another CT scan done when I got to Baltimore because they couldn’t get it in time before I left,” she said, explaining that the BC Cancer Center could give her no timeline of when they could see her. “And I said, ‘Well, will it help if my doctor phones on my behalf?’ And they said, ‘no’. And my doctor submitted my referral again and still no word. No word at all from (BC Cancer) until after I flew to Baltimore, had my surgery and got home.”
She had to spend $200,000 out of pocket for surgery, chemotherapy, scans, travel, and hotel rooms, and thankfully, is now doing well. “I feel 100 per cent,” she said. “Some days even better. There is nothing that I did before I got sick that I can’t do now. I mean, I can ride my bike 15 kilometres and go have dinner with friends and ride home afterwards. I can golf 18 holes without feeling tired. I started running again and I haven’t run for 10 years.”
READ: ‘Faces of MAID’ social media campaign opposes Canada’s euthanasia program
She has since applied for BC Cancer Center to be made to pay for her expenses.
Dr. Armando Sardi, of the Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, treated Ducluzeau and said he never considered her to be a poor candidate for treatment. “I have been doing this procedure for over 30 years and we have so many people alive beyond ten, 15 years, 18, 20 years later,” he said. “That is pretty impressive, you know? Without the surgery, there is not really a good hope. But it requires, of course, the expertise of someone who is willing to spend the hours because these are long operations that lies somewhere between eight and sometimes 12, 15 hours. But most of the time somewhere between eight and 10 hours.”
The number of people who have died from MAID in Canada has quadrupled each year, and now make up 4.1% of all deaths. The government does not list MAID as a cause of death, but according to one expert, if it did, it would be the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.
