A Bitter End

A daughter gets caught up in a right-to-die case after she hands morphine to her 92-year-old father, who, for a long time, had expressed a desire to die:

Mancini had explained to the nurse that her father wanted to die, and that he had a DNR on file. To her shock, the nurse called 911, and the police and paramedics arrived. “I told them, ‘He asked me for his morphine, and I handed it to him,’ and they said, ‘Well, let’s go to the hospital,’” says Mancini. Despite her pleading, Yourshaw was loaded into the ambulance and taken to the hospital. “I said, ‘He’s suffering! He wants to die!’ And that got turned into, ‘She gave him his morphine so he could die.’” That phrasing appears many times in official documentation of what happened.

Published: Jun 26, 2014
Length: 50 minutes (12,732 words)