Brian Griffin has incurable blood cancer and, while he is well enough at the moment after a second and final stem cell transplant, he knows that eventually the transplant benefits will fade and he will be left with chemotherapy and painkillers which may in the end not work and leave him in agony. He is supporting the assisted dying bill.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00In 2010, I was diagnosed with myeloma, or multiple myeloma as most people know it,
00:07and it's an incurable cancer. It tends, from what I understand, not to kill as such, it's just that
00:14it affects your other organs so badly, whether it be a blood cancer or a bone cancer, that your other
00:20organs fail, and in my case it appears it's the kidneys that it's affecting most, and I understand
00:28dying through kidney failure can be an extremely painful death. I've had one stem cell transplant
00:36and that lasted a wonderful 10 years when I was free of the cancer, but as I say it's incurable
00:43and it came back, so I've had a second stem cell transplant, and with each transplant,
00:48that's lasted three years, my second one so far, with each transplant you get radiotherapy,
00:55chemotherapy and so on, but as I say eventually the second one will fail, and I understand that
01:02they don't give third ones, so all I will have then is just chemotherapy, and I understand that
01:12that's carried on until either I give up with it and say no I can't take any more, or I pass away,
01:18whichever is the first. So why do you support the assisted dying bill? Many years ago now,
01:25a relative of mine passed away in similar circumstances, and it was a horrible, horrible
01:31death to witness. They were squirming about on a bed in absolute pain for hour after hour,
01:40and the medical people were not able to help in terms of giving any more pain relief, because
01:48it would have killed the person, and they weren't allowed to do that. So it was a horrible, horrible
01:56situation. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, and it's certainly not something I want to go through
02:00myself. So if you like, I'm thinking of it as an insurance thing, that if my pain level gets
02:07to such a level that painkillers can't cope, can't calm it down anymore, then I'm not going
02:15to that area where the pain is so bad, painkillers can't help me anymore,
02:21and I'm suffering tremendously. What do you think to the objections to the bill?
02:29I can understand why people raise the objections that they are doing.
02:33I don't think they're valid because the safeguards in the bill are supposedly the best in the world,
02:39and it would require a change in the law for the bill to apply to people other than those it
02:44is going to apply to at the moment, i.e. those with less than six months to live.
02:49I think it's a matter of choice, and I can certainly understand people, as I do,
02:54wanting to choose that they would die a few months earlier possibly, rather than risk going through
03:01the absolute hell that I know can exist at the end, if you get to the stage where your pain
03:07can't be controlled by painkillers anymore.