Nurses, Brittany Maynard, Methods of Hastening Dying: No Easy Options

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City who is currently doing a graduate placement at AJN two days a week.

Last weekend, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard died, in her bed, in her bedroom, with her husband and immediate family beside her. I learned of her death on Twitter, along with millions of other readers. Several weeks earlier, Maynard had publicly announced, in a YouTube video, the way she planned to end her own life: using a lethal dose of medications prescribed to her for that purpose.

Maynard, while a compelling public advocate, is not the first to choose to die this way. Compassion and Choices, the organization that worked with Maynard to publicize her choice, lobbies for the drafting and passage of “death with dignity” laws, which currently exist in some form only in Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New Mexico, and Montana. Arizona.

In Oregon, where Maynard moved in order to be able to legally end her life before she was incapacitated by the effects of terminal brain cancer, approximately 71 other people made the same choice in 2013, the most recent year of reported data—the peak of a gradual increase from the law’s inaugural year of 1998, when 16 people did so.

Illustration by Denny Bond for AJN. All rights reserved.