DailyMail: Two best friends in their 40s, who look young and healthy, want to take their ownlives after hearing a talk from a controversial euthanasia physician – even though their own doctors are against it.
Pegie Liekens, 44, and Nancy Vermeulen, 43, from Belgium, have said that they cannot go on with their non-life threatening diseases so are turning to assisted suicide.
Liekens, a mother of one, suffered serious complications from anti-obesity surgery and can now only consume liquids and soft foods. She has to have regular blood transfusions because she has anaemia and also has an agonising herniated disc in her back.
In 2011 Miss Vermeulen was diagnosed with MS which leaves her exhausted for months on end. She wants to end her life before it gets much worse.
When both women spoke to their own doctors about assisted suicide, they were told not to do it.
Miss Liekens was told to wait a few years and to see what happened with her condition, and not to give up hope on medical advances in their lifetime. Miss Vermeulen told the National Post that her doctor said: ‘No, you’re too young’.
But they see an early death as the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ even though it will mean Miss Liekens makes an orphan of her son, 17.
The pair were inspired by Belgian doctor and right-to-die activist Wim Distelmans, who critics claim has a ‘license to kill anyone’ and issues ‘death on demand’.
The cancer specialist has already courted controversy for ending the life of a man who went through a botched sex change operation to become a woman.
Should Miss Liekens and Miss Vermeulen follow through on their promise, it will likely reignite the debate in their native Belgium – though it will horrify many in America where euthanasia is only legal in four states and millions bitterly opposing it.
The two friends known each other for 20 years during which time Miss Liekens and Miss Vermeulen have shared jobs, holidays, endless phone calls and thousands of happy memories.
Both women have elderly parents and only Miss Liekens has a child – she wants to wait until her son has finished college before taking her own life.
Describing her frustration with her condition, Miss Liekens said: ‘I’m fed up with the food. ‘I want meat and fish. I don’t want to be an old lady unable to drink a glass of champagne or eat a good meal.’
Miss Vermeulen said: ‘I try to enjoy life. Some days it works, some days it doesn’t. But if I don’t want to do it any more, I stop. I pull out the plug.’
The two friends are apparently committed to ending their lives and have downloaded the forms and spoken to an organisation which can assist them.
They admit that some people react as if they are crazy – but that won’t stop them. Miss Liekens said: ‘They say, ‘What are you talking about? There are people who are much worse. ‘But people don’t feel my pain and suffering.’
She added that for her death will be ‘like a light at the end of a tunnel’. She said: ‘You know that when the point comes that you cannot take it any more, you don’t think, ‘My God, how am I going to be here in pain?‘ If you want to get out, it can stop.’
Euthanasia is legal in Belgium but only so long as the patient is in a ‘futile medical condition of constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated’.
Lawmakers recently amended it to go even further and allow children and Alzheimer’s sufferers to be euthanised. Children will only be covered if they are ‘capable of discernment or affected by an incurable illness or suffering that we cannot alleviate’.
Among the patients that Distelmans has helped kill themselves was Belgian Nathan Verhelst, 44, who was born a woman called Nancy. He died of a lethal injection after requesting assisted suicide due to the ‘unbearable psychological suffering’ of his botcher operation which left him looking like a ‘monster’.
Distelmans opened the ULteam clinic with colleagues two years ago to help those seeking euthanasia – the name is a pun on the Dutch word for ultimate, meaning final. According to reports in the Belgian media, his team of doctors killed 33 patients in the last year, the first year of the clinic’s operation.
DCG