Dying Man Couldn’t Find Doctor To Aid Suicide When Physician Finally Found To Prescribe Suicide Drugs For Oregon Man, It Was Too Late

A man dying of lung and kidney cancer could not find a doctor willing to help him end his life before it was too late, despite overwhelming voter reapproval of the nation’s first assisted-suicide law.

Ray Frank, 56, told his ex-wife, Noranne Clayton, in October that his doctor wanted him to consider an experimental treatment, but if didn’t work, he wanted to die.

At the time, the assisted-suicide law still was under a federal court injunction that had blocked it from going into effect pending a November vote on a measure to repeal it.

Frank and his ex-wife talked about guns, but they decided against it. Noranne promised him that if he wanted her to, she would find a way to help him die, but she burst into tears after leaving his hospital room.

Frank’s daughter, Christina, was on a Portland State University internship in France when she got the call from her Noranne. She took the first flight out.

When Christina arrived home and saw her father, the twinkle was gone from his eyes. Everyone was trying to be optimistic and polite, but “my Dad was a totally different person. He was old. And I just kind of knew,” she said.

Christina had talked with her father about assisted suicide, and had agreed it should be considered.

But her brother, Ed, and their mother, Regine Alquier, oppose assisted suicide. They believe that God chooses the time of death and would not let a person suffer unduly.

Christina told her father that if he was considering physician-assisted suicide, he should not be afraid to talk to her about it. Ray had given Christina power of attorney for his health care, and told her he’d raised the subject with his doctor.

In the second week in November, after voters reaffirmed the Death With Dignity Act, word came the court injunction had been lifted.

Frank asked his doctor to help him die, but the doctor said he would not write Ray a lethal prescription, and suggested hospice care.

But Frank feared he would be trapped, hooked up to morphine, until his body shut down.

Noranne Clayton called doctors, one by one.

“I have a friend with terminal renal cancer who is in great discomfort,” she told each nurse she spoke to. “Do you have a doctor who can assist him in leaving his life?”

The answer, though polite, was always the same: We can’t help you.

In desperation, she called her dog’s veterinarian. She asked a dozen friends where she could get barbiturates. She got on the Internet and found numbers for right-to-die groups.

One of Noranne’s calls was to the right-to-die organization Compassion in Dying, whose executive director, Barbara Coombs Lee, found a doctor willing to help.

But when Dr. Nancy Crumpacker met Frank and examined him, she did not think he would make it through the law’s minimum 15-day waiting period.

Only three times before, in her 15 years as an oncologist, had patients asked her to help them die. But she had been unable to do so. Frank was the first person to seek her help under the law.

Frank was grateful, but just two days later, on Thanksgiving Day, he died, shortly after telling his daughter, “Do something.”