“I always wanted to die young and well. I asked for it: young and good. And it is coming true.” Sitting in the armchair in her room, in the palliative unit of the Meixoeiro hospital in Vigo, Laura Fernández speaks with a conviction and calm that is impressive. His silk tone, somewhat slowed down by painkillers, reveals an iron will and a humor that did not lose its edge. “I never wanted to reach 90 years old. And people tell you: ‘Well, but if you arrive safely…’. Damn, you never live well at 90, don’t give me shit!” Laura already knows that she is not going to live past 67. After almost two decades fighting for the Right to Die with Dignity (DMD), and after a “full life” she only hopes now to be able to put the “final touch” of euthanasia. Her only concern: that cancer will take her sooner and not be able to decide what “her last journey” will be like. For those, like her, who remain lucid until the end, the Xunta does not allow shortcuts.
This spring, Laura was diagnosed with “severe” urethral melanoma, a “very rare” type of tumor with “minimal chance of cure.” This neighborhood activist, who worked for more than twenty years as an administrator in Health, decided not to be treated with chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery as long as her body “was fine.” “I always had a very good relationship with my body: when something hurts, I treat the area as if I had a baby there and the body responds. “It’s amazing.” This time, the conversation was different: “If you can’t get well, don’t suffer too much,” he told her. With his doctors, he talked about timing: “I told them that I was going to take a few months to organize my life and that we would talk in September.” Since he was still fine by then, they decided to give themselves another 90 days, until December. But cancer had other plans.
“As of October 20, I started having very worrying urine infections.” She is treated with antibiotics and, despite an initial improvement, on the 24th she experiences abdominal pain so severe that it even “prevents her from breathing.” That night he goes to the emergency room. Tests discover that there are metastases in the liver and other organs. After dawning under observation, they repeat the ultrasound and the diagnosis is confirmed. “Since my story says that I reject treatment, they ask me what I want to do and I say palliatives.” On Friday the 25th at night they transferred her to that unit. When she arrives, Laura already does so with the intention of requesting euthanasia, but she will have to wait.
“The doctors didn’t come until Tuesday,” four days later. “They told me that they were going to find out and that we would talk the next day, because they had doubts.” They resolved them quickly: on Wednesday the 30th he made the first request. She and the doctor in charge signed, whom she defines as “an extraordinary woman.” Laura is full of praise for the palliative team. “It is, at least, the best we have in Galicia.” There they have taken away his pain with fentanyl patches, but not his fatigue. “I’m physically exhausted, I notice that I can’t handle my body,” she says while leaning on the pillow that she has spread on her lap. “Today I’m a little better, but yesterday I was terrible. With this infection in the lung area, no one can guarantee that I will not remain in a coma from one day to the next.”
The lack of a short path
The euthanasia law requires aid in dying to be requested twice, with a margin of fifteen days between both requests to clear up any doubts. The Xunta admits that the entire procedure lasts a “minimum” time of about 40 days. During that period, in 2023, 14 of the 38 euthanasia applicants in Galicia died, half of those who decided to follow the process to the end. And that’s what Laura doesn’t want.
“I talk to the doctors every day, they know that I have been a member of DMD for many years and that I am clear about it… but they tell me that we have to wait.” According to what he says, the doctors conveyed their demand to health “responsible people,” but the response was always the same: “that it couldn’t be done.” “As in all laws there are nooks and crannies to avoid things, I understand that it can be shortened in a case like this: cases in which the patient is totally safe.”
But the Xunta does not see it that way. Although it does not want to go into Laura’s particular case, the Ministry of Health responds that “in general, there is no abbreviated procedure for providing aid in dying, but rather there is a single procedure to apply when the patient retains the decision-making capacity.”
This lucidity is key, since the Organic Law for the Regulation of Euthanasia (LORE) states in its article 5: “If the responsible doctor considers that the loss of the applicant’s capacity to grant informed consent is imminent, he or she may accept “any shorter period that it considers appropriate based on the concurrent clinical circumstances, which must be recorded in the clinical history.”
However, this following of the norm is, today, unsustainable for DMD. Especially because, as they say, it varies depending on the territory of the State in which it is applied. “Once again, we find inequality between communities, in this case very serious because it involves the exercise of fundamental rights,” responds from Madrid, Dr. Fernando Marín, president of the association in the capital and member of the federal board. “If other communities respond effectively, why not Galicia?” he asks, especially when talking about “very few cases” each year. According to Marín, from the moment the president of the Guarantees and Evaluation Commission is informed of the request, “he should intervene and facilitate the processing.” For him, a response like “that’s how things are, come back tomorrow” is “an unacceptable reaction in 2024.”
It all started with Ramón Sampedro
“The LORE is so guaranteeing that it causes these obstacles, which is why it must be improved, a lot. If it doesn’t happen for me, I hope there is a movement that claims that this cannot happen: people cannot die waiting for euthanasia when things are done well.” And there, Laura also points out the Galician government: “Each autonomy belongs to a party, some have more interest and others less… and it cannot be that we are the last.”
The person who discharges any responsibility is the medical team that cares for her. “They know that, for me, as a DMD activist, euthanasia is very important,” he says, and that is why he adds: “They guaranteed me that, if it does not arrive, they would give me sedation.” The difference, for her, is a matter of time. “With euthanasia I say when, where and how I want to die and they do it very quickly. It is similar to a total anesthesia before an operation. You hear: ‘Put fentanyl in it…’ and that’s it.” However, sedation requires a much longer process. “It could be hours, or even days.”
When asked how she became active in the defense of a dignified death, Laura answers emphatically: “Through Ramón Sampedro”, the activist who opened the debate on assisted suicide in Spain and inspired the film out to sea. “It seemed impossible to me that they would do that shit to a man who had such a clear head but no body.” Sampedro became a quadriplegic after an accident on the beach of As Furnas (Porto do Son). Thirty years later he drank cyanide through a straw to end his life, an act he recorded to show the firmness of his purpose. He died on January 12, 1998. That day, the activists commemorate – without the PP wanting to give them official recognition – the Día da Morte Digna in Galicia, which has moved its headquarters from As Furnas to Praza do Obradoiro in Santiago.
Laura did not know Sampedro, but she did meet his brother, his friends, and another key figure in the fight for euthanasia in Spain, the anesthetist Luis Montes. “It was a phenomenon.” With him he organized events and conferences in Galicia, a dissemination effort that he did not leave until the end. On September 26, a month before his admission to the emergency room, he still participated in a talk in Ferrol about the living will. “There were almost a hundred people,” he remembers. However, she never imagined that she would also end up fighting for herself. “No, because when you are young you think that you are not going to die…”
The last trip
Laura’s room in palliative care is bustling with people. Since they joined, more than 120 people have passed by and they all left “full of energy.” “I have many friends,” she says smiling, convinced that the maxim that “the more you give, the more you will receive” is true. And even things happened “so incredible” that “if I were a believer, I would talk about little miracles.” One of them: the child she had in foster care for four years, and who is now an adult serving time in prison, got permission to go to the hospital to say goodbye to her, even though, technically, they are not family.
That “technically” is because, for her, all her friends are part of her family. The one she formed with Pucho, her life partner, with whom she has lived for 42 years, although they did not get married until 2017. “You have thought it through, the judge told us,” she remembers laughing. They signed the papers after the crisis wiped out their small aluminum carpentry business in 2014. “I was still working in Health and he was self-employed, so we got married because he was going to have a shitty pension and it would bother me if no one collected mine.”
Laura and Pucho have two children: Sara and Daniel. She was biological, because in the early eighties they did not allow unmarried couples to adopt. When the law changed, Daniel arrived. “I wanted to adopt since I was little. When I saw the images of the Vietnam War, with those barefoot children, running queimadiñosI told my mother: ‘Mom, why don’t we adopt?’ We were a humble family – my mother, a housewife and my father, a carpenter – who had enough with the two of us.”
Now, that family unit accompanies her in her decision, although moments of weakness cannot be avoided. “My daughter is a DMD activist, but, of course, she doesn’t want her mother to die!” Together they have organized how the desired euthanasia will be. She is clear about the place: the hospital itself. He does not want that image to remain fixed in the home that they consider their own, even though they live in Vigo: a cottage in Tui, near the Portuguese border – “it cost us two million pesetas, it was the only thing we could aspire to” -, where even this summer between her and Pucho they changed the roof and where she is waiting for her to rest. ashes
At his farewell he waits for all the people who want to be there. And what will he tell them? “Well, guys, see you later Lucas… -Laura reinforces her words with a gesture-. That easy and then party.” There will be no mass nor flowers. “Whoever wants to spend should make a donation to the Beade Cultural Center,” the Vigo parish where he was a neighborhood leader, “which has enormous costs and an electricity bill that can exceed a thousand euros.”
This requirement will also appear in the obituary that they have already designed and in which, instead of a cross, the Galician translation of the motto of their DMD insignia will be read: My daughter will travel decidedly to Europe (“I decide my last trip”). A desire that, today, only bureaucracy could prevent.
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