FunshineCrayon Lives

December 15, 2022 10:09 PM

Just over a year ago after years of suffering from the debilitating pain of CRPS a popular TicTok content creator named FunshineCrayon decided to go into hospice and have a medically assisted death. It appeared that their journey had come to an end. This week they returned to their account to let folks know that they had survived, after being offered some new treatments. A more detailed video has been posted to their YouTube Channel
posted by interogative mood (16 comments total)

If anyone else was surprised, I just learned that medically assisted dying in Canada does not require a terminal illness to access, though this brings some additional safeguards.

I'm glad this person has gotten some mitigation to their CRPS, which can be awful.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:39 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

MAID here is also being pushed by people and drs who believe disability is well basically not worth living with and is being pushed upon disabled poor people that just need more funded options. Just tossing it in as not something that is without a dash of eugenics up here.
posted by Bemused Recluse at 11:52 PM on December 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

Hi, I've seen Disabled people and chronically ill people in Canada write blogs about how they have said to the relevant government authorities things along the lines of:

"I need equipment like a power wheelchair"
"I need more money to live on than Disability benefits provide"
"I need paid support staff"
"I need affordable wheelchair accessible housing"
"I need access to physiotherapists and other allied health professionals"

and got back the answer "that is not available, have you considered Medical Assistance in Dying [MAiD] ? "
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:17 AM on December 16, 2022 [14 favorites]

Honestly seeing how MAID has worked in Canada has totally changed my mind about it. For family reasons, I was always very pro chosen euthanasia in the face of warnings from disability activists, but seeing those news stories about people who are pushed to die because they literally just need a different apartment or something has convinced me that I should have listened. We should not have MAID for anything but very limited use for carefully defined terminal illness because the state will just use it to murder the disabled to save money, that's absolutely true and we should always listen to disability activists on stuff like this.

"This thing is not objectively bad and could be good to have" is not the same as "our society as now constituted will use this thing safely and responsibly".

I'm sure glad that this person was able to get effective treatment. On another note, I don't have any theory about it or anything, but it is so interesting how Tik-Tok has evolved into this space where individual people produce this really, really intense and immediate personal content - it's not that, like, there are no personal blogs or that nothing intense and immediate happens on Facebook but Tik-Tok is a classic difference in quantity/difference in kind.
posted by Frowner at 2:36 AM on December 16, 2022 [21 favorites]

This story struck me because 1. MAiD does seem to be liberally applied by the Canadian government, to the point where people without terminal diseases and with a demonstrated will to live can get into the process simply by being poor and old 2. nobody was willing to sign off on this girl's MAiD application despite her having a condition that was seemingly desperate enough for her to enter hospice and have a feeding tube removed, condemning her to death by starvation.

I don't know what the actual situation is here and what happened between the hospice entry and now but the news footage of the parents angry that the daughter couldn't get MAiD is going to stick with me.
posted by kingdead at 6:20 AM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

My anecdotal experience is that in rural and suburban Ontario, a decade of online propaganda has turned people into red-staters - so MAiD is Trudeau's evil Liberals, while their conservative Ford government (voted in with a majority) who are more directly responsible for health and social services?…they're going to fix everything through privatization.

There are people in Buttfuck, Ontario who picture privately funded hospitals springing up from the corn fields.
posted by brachiopod at 7:32 AM on December 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

We should not have MAID for anything but very limited use for carefully defined terminal illness

We have that in a number of U.S. states and it works pretty well.
posted by atoxyl at 8:04 AM on December 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

my worry is in March where they are opening it up to mental illness. not to mention floating the idea of mature minors. I mean yes I spent 10 years saying that I want access to it and it was cruel people were expecting me to live but that went away a lot when I started living my real gender and got my suicidal ovaries taken out. as much as I loathe the saying it can get better. The people on this committee are just heartless.
posted by Bemused Recluse at 8:35 AM on December 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Its worth also mentioning the article by the Disabled woman in her 20s/30s with a swallowing disorder that had progressed to the point that she could no longer eat, but who would have decades of life to enjoy if she was fitted out with a feeding tube

Disabled woman: I want a feeding tube, I want to live

Far too many drs: Feeding tubes are a hassle, difficult to clean, prone to infection, have you considered the alternative

Disabled woman: You know that without this feeding tube I will die, right?

Drs: Yes but feeding tubes are such a hassle. Have you considered just dying to save us the hassle?

In the end it took a concerted pressure campaign from her friends and supporters and the threat of legal action to get her god damn feeding tube installed.

I can't find the article (google is failing me) but it was the US, UK or Canada, and it would have been around 2010 or 2011.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:00 AM on December 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

That's what's so bizarre about this specific case! Most media coverage of MAiD is about doctors encouraging euthanasia for or actually signing off on people who are not terminal at ALL by commonly accepted Western standards. They have disabilities that are expensive to treat, they have mental illness, they're unable to access overstretched social services.

This is the one case I've seen where there was a very public attempt to access MAiD for someone with a physical diagnosis, it was denied, hospice treatment began and the patient recovered.
posted by kingdead at 9:18 AM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not sure that’s bizarre so much as adding realistic complexity to the media narrative.
posted by atoxyl at 9:59 AM on December 16, 2022

Our elderly, bright, stubborn and exceptionally strong-willed mother took the Swiss euthanasia clinic route in October.

She was not terminally ill, was 100% compos mentis, she had friends (and grand and great grandchildren) galore but mightily missed our late stepfather - who died last year - and she was in chronic arthritic pain.

I am perfectly aware it is not remotely the responsibility of these clinics to make sure their non-terminally ill, paying clients - the procedure costs about 10,000 UK sterling - have fully explained the decision to their adult children. I get that - it's way beyond their scope.

The Pegasos clinic says specifically on its website: "Pegasos is strongly of the opinion that you should inform your family at some point, even if you know that they will not be supportive.".

I remain strongly of the opinion that Pegasos should, however, at least fund a website for those left behind. The complicated grief, unfocused guilt and disbelief can be very hard.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 10:56 AM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Its worth also mentioning the article by the Disabled woman in her 20s/30s with a swallowing disorder that had progressed to the point that she could no longer eat, but who would have decades of life to enjoy if she was fitted out with a feeding tube

That's Mel Baggs, who fought tooth and nail to stay alive in the face of a medical system relentlessly pressuring hir to die, until sie finally died in 2020.
posted by BlueNorther at 12:05 PM on December 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

...Possibly this piece from hir blog.
ETA: nope, probably not that one, but one of the posts in that series.
posted by BlueNorther at 12:12 PM on December 16, 2022

Those suffering with chronic pain are being treated as acceptable collateral damage in the war on opioid overdoses. Doctors are afraid to prescribe opioids for fear of being subject to the zeal of investigators forking for drug enforcement agencies. Those that do have to subject their patients to regular drug tests and other documentation to prove the patients aren’t selling their supply. And of course the disabled who have chronic pain are extremely vulnerable to crime where despite the best efforts of the Doctor and the patient the drugs end up on the street at which point the doctor gets their license suspended.
posted by interogative mood at 3:37 PM on December 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks to BlueNorther I think I've found the story about the young Disabled person who had to fight Drs for the right to get a feeding tube rather than dying far too early:

https://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/feeding-tubes-and-weird-ideas/
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:49 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]