2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [33]
California was still not quite sure. No one would question a doctor letting a patient go in peace if there was great suffering, but in 2023 a lawsuit was brought against a physician by the family of a seventy-five-year-old woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was slowly losing all movement of her body and she begged the doctor to end it. He did, and three days later one of the big medical journals announced a possible cure. Even though the cure was years away and had not even started trials, the family sued. And won.
A jury got very emotional and ignored the woman’s suffering. They sided with hope. The doctor’s insurance company had to pay twenty million dollars. That decision scared other physicians in California away from the practice of euthanasia, and this left a void in the state. Hence, Walter Masters.
Walter Masters was a seventy-year-old science professor who watched his wife lie in a coma for six years before she died. Every doctor had said there was no chance of recovery, but she was not brain dead and no one would pull the plug. Masters was a mild-mannered man who lost it. Flipped out. And after that ordeal he decided he was put on the earth to keep other families from the same kind of interminable suffering, aside from draining all of their resources. The sad thing in his case was that for years he and his wife had talked about their feelings on this matter. He knew she didn’t want to be kept alive by machines, but she never wrote it down. He had always told his students that whenever something was important, write it down. And in this one case he didn’t follow that advice.
So there he was, a modern-day Kevorkian, but friendlier looking. With a shock of gray hair and a small mustache, Masters looked distinguished and somewhat mad at the same time. And he became famous in the underground world of euthanasia.
Masters took no chances. He would never end life if all the immediate family members were not on board, or if he sensed any ulterior motive, and he would not do the actual deed. He set up a drip system that would start five minutes after it was inserted. He insisted that the family be there and that they, or the patient if the patient was able, start the drip. Or they could stop it, but no one ever did. People didn’t go to that much trouble and then change their minds.
Walter also said no occasionally. Once there was a man who was forty-five and a quadriplegic—a skier who took a wrong turn and fell down a mountain. No doctor would ever end a quadriplegic’s life if his brain was functioning, not even in Oregon. So the man called Masters and asked for a meeting.
When Walter got there he was very understanding of the man’s condition, but told him that he thought the man could make something out of his life since his mind was intact and there were so many new devices that would allow him to get around. Walter said he would have considered it thirty years ago, but with all the mobility the man was offered, he refused to terminate. The man begged. “Please, my wife left me and took my children and moved out of state. I’m all alone. I want to die.”
“I’m sorry,” Walter said. “I think with some counseling you can still lead a good life. And you don’t want your children to be without a father. I cannot help you, but I will give you the name of someone to talk to.”
“I have no money for that.”
So he treated the man to ten sessions with a psychologist. It was a wonderful gesture even though it came to nothing. The last he heard was that the man was still living and got just enough movement back that he could inject himself with heroin. You can’t win ’em all.
Walter felt the strong shaking of the great quake even though he lived in Kern County, almost two hundred miles north of Los Angeles.