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Welcome to my healing journey CE! Thanks for those who have been on the ride since before she passed away. These topics have been absolutely critical to my healing and it seems that others have joined in the healing, sharing their own grief stories, and working together to be better today than we were yesterday.

For those who have not yet dipped their toes into my journey, my wife passed away on July 17th, 2023. She passed away utilizing the MAID program in Canada (Medical Assistance in Death).

To make a very long medical journey short, she had multiple medical conditions that made her life just not something she wanted to continue living. It is important to note that she was already dying, and that death would have been cruel. I will discuss it here briefly to give some context.

Ehlors Danlos - A degenerative connective tissue syndrome which causes your joints, limbs, and organs to rip and tear. There is no cure nor really any sort of significant treatment options right now. Most people who have bad Ehlors Danlos eventually have a trip or fall that causes one of their major organs to rupture and thus pass away. There are degrees of how bad it can be. My wife's specialist in a prognosis update in July stated that my wife had one of the most debilitating experiences of Ehlors Danlos he had ever seen. My wife had a pacemaker installed in her early 20's due most likely to Ehlors Danlos. The only real treatment that exists is pain management, which was impossible due to...

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome - Mast Cells are what are responsible in your body for allergic reactions. Basically, my wife's Mast Cells were in constant overdrive. She would have allergic reactions to most things. We could not use laundry detergent, most types of soap, she could barely eat anything and eventually towards the end of her life was on an all-liquid diet. This also impacted her ability to use medication and her body could only tolerate Tylenol near the end of her life, which did basically nothing. She tried literally hundreds of different medications, almost all of which caused her allergic reactions.

Long Covid - What prompted us to even discuss MAID in the first place was when we both, in September of 2022, got COVID. I had to be off work for a week and during that week my wife sat me down and told me what her day to day life was like and that outside of the time we spent together, her life was misery. I recovered from COVID fairly well with no linger side-effects, my wife had weakness and breathing problems that stayed until she passed away.

She had a multitude of other things that came as a result of the medical problems. Lots of mental health tied into it, from a sexually and physically abusive upbringing to being gaslit by the medical field, from a mother struggling with bi-polar, being a rape survivor... just kinda had a rough go of it for most of her life. I met her right as her health started to seriously decline. She would apologize to me almost daily for me being "forced" to take care of her as these conditions materialized, worsened, and eventually made her life not something she wanted to continue.

In September of 2022 she let me know her intention to use the MAID program. She gave me an out then, and many days after that. She told me she understood if I didn't want to literally watch her die. I told her there was no way in hell she would ever do this alone and that the last thing she would ever see is the face of her loving husband as she got to say goodbye to her pain and suffering. It's hard to watch the person you love most in this world die. It's hard to watch her suffer. But spending time with her? Sharing in her world? It was as natural as breathing to me.

The journey wasn't easy. She was declined here in Saskatchewan where we live... a province we were ALWAYS gaslit in about her health. It was so much easier for doctors to just assume my wife was somatic and that her problems were mental health related. We had to go see a specialist in Alberta to get her Ehlors Danlos and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome properly diagnosed. Even then, doctors here would question those diagnoses and claim that they didn't believe her. We contacted Dying with Dignity who told us to reach out to a doctor in BC who helped CREATE the law.

She spoke with my wife over Zoom and in a 45 minute conversation with her and looking at her medical history, agreed that she could use MAID. We needed to find a second doctor who would do it... and due to some legal challenges (that won't go anywhere but are still annoying), none of her colleagues were willing to see her. She got a different Saskatchewan doctor to try to be the second assessor... and he demanded documentation from mental health experts on all the work she tried to do with them (mental health is not part of MAID yet, it is about physical maladies). Thankfully after hearing about that, the first assessor in BC FINALLY found someone willing to do it. She chatted with us for 25 minutes and said yes.

With this final approval on July 12th, my wife and I bought tickets to BC, flew out on the 16th, and on the 17th at 5:31pm, my wife... the strongest person I've ever known and one of the most beautiful souls to ever be, was finally allowed to put down her burdens. I took this picture about 5 minutes before she passed away. You can see how happy she was to be able to just rest.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a3329cad.jpg