The first assessment for MAiD

It was the first time in my 75 years a doctor has ever paid me a home visit. 
He is a MAiD assessor. 
We sat at my kitchen table for about an hour. He gently probed my motivation, what my thoughts were about existence, my medical history. He has very neat handwriting. For a doctor I mean. He wrote very precise and tidy notes on a form. He explained the process. He emphasized more than once how voluntary everything is, right up to the minute before the first injection. 
Another medical professional will come to interview me in a few weeks, a second assessor. I presume they know each other (this is a very small prairie city, just 10K people) but will be ethical and hand in their assessments independently of each other without conferring. I am obliged to trust the process as laid out. That it's a collaborative process at some higher bureaucratic level, if I'm deemed acceptable for the program. 

I can't imagine I won't be. But it's not in my hands. Not yet. 
My medical history is scant. No major fractures. No operations apart from tonsils out when I was five, and a D&C when my hormones were undergoing deep renovation, about age 38, and I bled almost non-stop. Like, three weeks on and one week off. Scant amount but very annoying. The D&C was supposedly for fibroids, which it turned out I did not have, and didn't really fix the issue. I had to wait for hormonal issues to stop by themselves. After the bleeding finally stopped I tapped into a lot of extra energy, probably from endogenous androgens kicking into gear. Yeah, I needed to invest in a good pair of tweezers, because with androgens come whiskers, but that's a small price to pay for feeling good. 

I am really not in any hurry, at this point in time; I have incurable metastasized cancer, thanks to some rogue, estrogen-addled breast ductal cells who figured out how to escape through some not-on-the-ball lymph node, and managed to spread all over the place before I knew about it, boosting their estrogen production agenda all over the place. But I'm not "suffering" from it. Apparently "suffering" is one of the criteria for being admitted.

I asked him, who gets to define "suffering"? And he answered, good question.

Obviously it's a sticky point. I mean, there are humans walking around who are physically capable of living long lives but who suffer intense agony just because they find existence unbearable, and are classified as having a "psychiatric" illness. They suffer exquisitely, but are not deemed acceptable for medical assistance in dying. Many of them figure out how to do themselves in. I'm thinking of farmers who hang themselves. Etcetera. Then some family member discovers them. And that's going to leave a mark on them for the rest of their lives. Etcetera. 
But I digress. 
He inquired after my own mental health. Had I ever been diagnosed with a mental illness? I said no. That I had experienced depression, self-diagnosed. That my last bout was about 3 years long after covid came and I retired. That discovering Oscar Peterson on YouTube helped enormously. That I felt like I was at the bottom of a well, and Oscar Peterson was a rope that came dangling down and provided me an exit. 

He wanted to know where I came from, spiritually.
I took the opportunity to tell him that I had been raised in a mixed marriage, a Catholic mother of Polish and French ancestry and a dad of Brit ancestry who had been raised in sort of a northern European/Brit bible tent faith that was more low-key than Pentecostal. More sedate. That I had cousins who were missionaries. That I had never been indoctrinated in anything, any religion, specifically. Had always been a "heathen." 
That any spiritual leanings I ever had were adequately met when I attended workshops by First Nations people. How everything that exists, whether nature made it or humans made it, is already sacred, and equally sacred, including me, and no one is better or more sacred than anyone or anything else. I took the opportunity to tell him my idea that existence is a thin slice of meat between two giant bun halves of non-existence. He kind of liked that idea, I think. He said he'd never heard it described that way. He said, "So you feel... connected?" I took it to mean, did I feel connected to the universe, and I replied, yes. 

I'm glad the first assessment is over and I patiently await the second. I mean, all I want is to not have to think about the end of it all. To have a plan in place so that I don't find myself sucked down the whirlpool of worrying about how it will feel. If this program accepts me, my demise won't hurt at all except for the initial IV insertion. Hopefully with a very thin calibre needle, like the one they used for my first infusion. 

I wrote down a few adjacent thoughts that were not as me-focused. Here they are: 
1.  A society that really respects individual sovereignty/autonomy will make itself democratic enough to accommodate a graceful dignified exit from human life as much as it celebrates entrance to human life. Canada has stepped up. (I love Canada for that.)
2. MAiD might be something the baby boom generation facilitated. I mean, we (I say "we" because I'm a boomer), we left stretch marks on society as my cohort passed through it when we were infants, children, high schoolers, young adults (especially when we were young adults!), older adults, and now, retired, most of us, aging and requiring care at the end of life.
3. It's not healthy for a society to have a glut at the far end, more people to be cared for than there are caregivers, not to mention the strain on the health care system. I think it is healthy for society to accommodate us in this way too. Win win. Our (famous) generational narcissism is indulged (because we were such a large group of humans, we always got our psychosocial way); a percent of us can opt for this, which saves wear and tear on everybody else.
4. The notion that suffering is mandatory for humans while we die (while other beloved mammals are given peaceful deaths) is probably a hangover from punitive religion. As a boomer I'd like to take that notion out of existence along with me when I leave. You know, down the road, eventually.
5. I am reminded of acceptance and commitment therapy, started by that boomer, Steven Hayes, way back when, and his emphasis on changing data gathering by paying idionomic respect to every human in every walk of life where data is collected. By listening. My hour-long experience with the assessor was that MAiD takes acceptance and commitment seriously. I felt heard. I felt accepted. I felt understood. As a person.

I watched this very moving documentary about MAiD a day or two ago, cried through the whole thing, just about. In My Own Time.  Sooooooo gooooood.