Saskatoon woman rejected 3 times for medical assistance in dying

A Saskatoon woman who says she’s been living with chronic pain for years says her requests for a medically assisted death have been turned down three times.

Karen Klassen says she wants to end her life rather than deal with the unbearable pain she’s dealt with for most of her adult life.

“It’s so horrendous, my life without the pain medications is just so terrible,” Karen Klassen told CTV News.

She doesn’t want to be on highly addictive drugs like opioids and hasn’t had medical care for years.

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“I literally have zero health care. I have no doctor. I have major health concerns and major problems right now,” she says.

Her doctor left their practice in the mid-90s, then Klassen took over her own care.

Now, a lack of family doctors has left no one to prescribe medications or to make specialist referrals.

She wants approval so a doctor can help her die.

As a registered nurse herself, Klassen feels confident in her assessment. She says her conditions include severe migraines, autoimmune issues, osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia, a disorder that causes pain tenderness and fatigue.

“I’ve had so much pain my whole life that I don’t want to die in pain. I’d like to be comfortable,” she says.

Klassen admits to making plans to take her own life, even plotting to jump off her balcony, but she would rather to do it through the Medical Assistance in Dying program in Saskatchewan, or MAID.

She applied three times and has been rejected each time, and she feels it’s unfair.

Being rejected for the MAID program isn’t uncommon.

“Just because you ask for MAID, doesn’t mean you will be eligible. It’s a pretty thorough process that sometimes does result in clinicians saying this isn’t the right process for you and you don’t fit the criteria,” said Helen Long, CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada.

Long heads the national human rights charity that advocates and supports end of life cases.

There were 12,000 applications for MAID from Canadians in 2021, a process Long says is done with intravenous medications.

“Four-hundred eighty-seven of those were deemed ineligible and a clinician did some assessment and deemed them ineligible; 231 were withdrawn,” she says.

In totally, 9,000 people ended their life through the program that year.

Klassen is currently on medical marijuana, which makes the pain more bearable, she says, but she hopes for a more permanent solution.

“None of us that have applied for MAID want to die, but it’s a would-you-rather.”