Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Berkeley of Knighton and Lord McColl of Dulwich

Friday 16th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. I have been in practice for very many years and I still am. One of the things that always struck me was how wrong I was about trying to predict when a patient would die. I well remember a typical case of a lady who was only 28. She had inoperable cancer of her throat. She was in great distress, with pain and distressed breathing. I saw my job as a doctor to relieve all her symptoms, whatever the cost. I said to her, “If you like, I can put a needle into your vein and titrate you with heroin”. Heroin is a marvellous drug. You have to dilute it in a large volume and not use the small volumes in the ampoule, because if a gun goes off you might suddenly give them too much too quickly. I titrated her and asked her to tell me when all the symptoms had gone. Eventually she said, “Yes, that’s fine”. It was a huge dose of heroin. I had no problem about giving it. The strange thing was, not only did it not kill her, it gave her a new lease of life. It is unrelieved pain that is the killer.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton]

The noble Lord said earlier that he gave his patient a huge dose of heroin. He used the words, “whatever the cost”. If it had killed her, would the noble Lord feel that he had assisted, maybe nobly, in her dying?

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

The problem is that when you give these very powerful drugs, the symptoms are relieved but the patient is subject to the complications of being in bed for a long time, including clots in the veins of the legs. These may dislodge, go to the lungs and kill them, or they may develop pneumonia because their breathing is not quite as effective. Those are the complications but I resist the idea that I am deliberately killing them; I am deliberately relieving all their symptoms.