Debate over whether treatment hastens death "You say you don't want to hasten a patient's death but if it lasts more than a week without hydration and nutrition but experts like nephrologists say beyond seven days one drop of liquid probably adds a bit to the dying process," said Boisvert. Marcel Boisvert, a retired palliative care doctor who worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, has used palliative sedation with a number of patients.īoisvert said doctors can't say with 100-per-cent certainty that palliative sedation can't, in even a small way, hasten death because often artificial hydration and liquids are withdrawn from the patient when the sedation is given. It examined patient charts and found that it was used on 16 per cent of dying patients with intractable, refractory suffering at the end of life.Īcross Canada other hospitals have done audits like at Elizabeth Bruyère and it's been found that palliative sedation is used anywhere from four to 20 per cent of dying patients.ĭespite being used at hospitals like Bruyère Continuing Care, the treatment is seen by some health experts as blurring the lines between a sound clinical therapy and euthanasia.ĭr. Pereira added the symptoms must also be refractory, meaning all other drugs that have been tried have failed to control the symptoms.īruyère hospital conducted an audit in 2008 looking back several years on how often palliative sedation was used. Jose Pereira, the medical chief of palliative care at the Ottawa Hospital and Bruyère Continuing Care in Ottawa, has used palliative sedation and said it is an important and useful option that is only used when symptoms such as pain, breathlessness or delirium are intolerable. So she was given midazolam, a benzodiazapene used as a sedative before anesthesia is administered for surgery. Two weeks before her death, Stephanie agreed to be fully sedated to the point of unconsciousness because the pain was too intense. It's a treatment called palliative sedation that is fraught with controversy among doctors both here in Canada and around the world. Lanctot's medical team approached her with what they described as a "last resort" option. Lanctot's medical team at Elizabeth Bruyère Continuing Care in Ottawa had exhausted all pain medications trying to control the excruciating pain caused by the four tumours growing in her abdomen, but nothing worked. She'd be screaming every hour … Mom, Mom help me," said Maggie Lanctot. One tumour became an open wound just eating away at her. "Her pain was just unbearable - I mean her screaming - at one point they were draining the tumour and I could just hear her screaming through the doors of the operating room.
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27, 2010 in Ottawa from stage four cervical cancer. Stephanie Lanctot died at the age of 25 on Nov.
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Maggie Lanctot describes her daughter Stephanie's last few months of life as "a nightmare of pain that no parent should ever have to witness."