Clear minded at the time of death…..

Someone told Linda Fleming a fib, I think. Quoting from this article

“I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death,” Fleming said in a statement released Friday. “The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death. And I knew I would have to increase them.”

With family members, her physician and her dog at her side, Fleming took a deadly dose of prescription barbiturates and died Thursday night at her home in Sequim, Wash.”

Ms. Fleming is the first person to kill herself under the new law in Washington state.

She apparently feared dying naturally from her pancreatic cancer. Perhaps there were considerable unaddressed pain issues. But the quote above indicates that she was given false advertising concerning what her state of mind would be at the time of death from oral barbiturates. Admittedly, the death from the intravenously administered forms could be rather quick. But the options under the Washington law for suicide require that the drug be self administered. Those with experience know that the assisted suicides can fail to go as planned and sometimes result in quite prolonged and messy deaths.

Sorry to say, but it appears that Linda Fleming’s expectations of her death process, being clear minded at the end, were not likely met with the options at hand.