RAR: The most critical part of the training centers on
the Network's recommended method of death.
A death by helium is as peaceful a death as you will ever have.
If someone put a hood over your head, carbon dioxide, carbon
monoxide starts to build up, and your body senses air hunger, and
it becomes very terrifying as it
realizes that you're suffocating.
Helium is completely different than that.
Your body doesn't recognize the
difference between oxygen and helium.
You breathe four times, five times. It's very comfortable.
It's just like you're breathing air.
And then, boom, the lights go out.
We'll show you what has been the usual equipment.
The exit guides review all the equipment needed
for what they call "the death
event"-- a plastic hood, a tube, and a helium tank.
The tubing should be, oh, about eight to ten inches inside
when they place the hood on their head.
Helium is available in party stores or balloon stores and so on.
And the hoods can be very easily
made out of plastic bags that are at home.
The earliest hoods that were used were turkey bags.
So the patient can get the
products they need without any problem at all.
In other words, you don't need a physician to prescribe anything.
It's totally in the patient's hands.
Two helium tanks have to be sort of removed before
paramedics, police, firemen and all that.
Somebody, I guess, gets them into the car and drives to a
dumpster somewhere. We think it's best that
they are removed from the premises totally.
But before any death event can occur, Final
Exit Network requires that all
applicants be reviewed by its medical committee, formerly
headed by Dr. Lawrence Egbert,
a retired anesthesiologist. All the patients are asked to
send their medical records in and we have a letter from the
patient about why I want to die
in writing so I'd have all that available.
I would then evaluate that and then I would say, well that's
easy, that's straightforward, the patient has a horrible pain,
the patient has a horrible loss
of dignity and therefore I would write accepted.
In the time that I was medical director for Final Exit Network,
I approved approximately 300
cases and probably rejected ten. I think the majority of
patients are quite content with helium.
One reason that some don't is the idea of having this balloon
over the top of your head. The balloon has the lack of
dignity, but so does taking sleeping pills.
It has nowhere near the loss of
dignity that a shotgun carries, or a rope.
Let's see, I've got a bag here. Dr. Egbert insists
that anyone who uses the helium method is completely in
control, and makes the final decision alone.
The point of no return is when a patient pulls it down and
that's made very clear to them. And I often will say, "Once you
pull it down, you've made the decision.
If you pull... full of helium, pull this down over your head,
you'll be unconscious between 30
and 60 seconds, and unless you have a very vigorous, strong
heart, dead within eight to ten minutes.
When a person dies, then we'll take the bag off.
And after they... we've sat for a few minutes.
That way, if the relatives are there, we'll ask them
explicitly to wait a couple of hours, so the body will cool,
so that somebody won't try and resuscitate.
If they try and resuscitate right away, they can get a
heart... the heart's very tough and the brain is not so tough.
So the heart will start up again.
And I've seen a person like that
where the heart started up beautifully, normally, but the
brain was totally dead.
And that, we do... that is the ultimate of disasters.