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4. Divided States of Analgesia
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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131 FOUR Divided States of Analgesia Stand, I pray thee, upon me, and slay me: for anguish is come upon me. 2 Samuel 1:9 When Sherry Miller turned to Michigan pathologist Jack Kevorkian for relief in 1992 she was in severe pain and living a life of horrible desperation. Like the other people who turned to Kevorkian for help, Miller had a well-documented trail of suffering and physical demise. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1983, her body was deteriorating steadily. By 1989, she used a wheelchair; often, her father carried her. When she first wrote to Kevorkian in 1990, he encouraged her to seek treatment for the disease and to consult a psychiatrist. By 1991, she had decided to commit suicide—a decision supported by her family. A year later, Kevorkian consented to help her by rigging up a “suicide machine ” very much like the one that Janet Adkins, a fifty-four-year-old Portland, Oregon, woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, had used to end her life in 1990.1 For these flagrant acts, Kevorkian found himself castigated by doctors, criticized and mocked by the media as Dr. Death, and charged in legal dramas spanning from 1990 to 1999. The questions at the center of the legal storm were these: Was Kevorkian practicing compassionate pain relief as he alleged, or was he committing murder? And what constitutional rights, if any, would be granted to such acts carried out in the name of pain relief? Among the people Kevorkian helped to die, all their pains differed. Marjorie Wantz’s pain contrasted sharply with Miller’s, but she too wrote to Kevorkian for help.Wantz suffered from extreme vaginal pain, for which she had undergone nine or ten surgeries. Unrelieved, she contemplated 132 PAIN suicide. Caregivers raised questions about her mental competence, but these concerns had already been put to rest by a psychological examination . Wantz had gone to clinics in Cleveland and Detroit as well as to the Mayo Clinic where she was told nothing could be done beyond the pain pills, four times as strong as morphine, she was taking. When she first approached Kevorkian for help, he suggested other therapeutic options, even pointing Wantz to hypnosis. The mystery of her condition was that it was not due to any discernible degenerative disease—as Kevorkian quoted one of her doctors, “It would have been better off to be cancerous , at least in six months you might be dead.” For two years, Wantz asked Kevorkian for help in dying, even attempting unsuccessfully once to shoot herself. She wrote, “No doctor can help me anymore. If God won’t come to me, I’m going to God. Can’t stand it no longer.” For her, the only truly effective form of relief from such anguish would be death. On October 22, 1991, Sherry Miller and Marjorie Wantz committed suicide, together, in a cabin in Michigan. Of the two of them, only Wantz ended up using Kevorkian’s device—Miller’s veins were, by this point, too weak. Although Kevorkian was not actually present for their deaths, he had openly assisted them in their planning, going so far as to participate in television interviews on their decision beforehand. Later, when he faced state charges over what was becoming known as physician-assisted suicide (PAS), he explained to juries that his aim was not primarily to help Miller die but to relieve her pain. Kevorkian believed that he was on a mission: “my ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience.” His only crime was to give her the means to carry out that compassionate act of self-relief leading to her death. Hearing his pain defense, jury after jury would acquit him, and a fourth case would be declared a mistrial. Only in 1999, under much different circumstances, when he was not allowed to use the pain defense that served him so well through most of the decade, would Kevorkian be convicted. The suicide machine Kevorkian had invented was simple enough—it first administered a saline solution, then the push of a button precipitated the injection of pentothal (thiopenthal), which slowly induces coma. Adkins had one minute after pressing that button to change her mind. When she did not, another injection of potassium chloride and a muscle relaxant followed, stopping the heart. Death came six to seven minutes later.2 While controversy flared over the issue of physicians’ roles in help- [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03...