It’s too late to help me, but please, lords, spare others this needless pain

Last week was the third anniversary of my diagnosis with stage four lung cancer – and to my astonishment, thanks to one of the new miracle drugs, I’m still here. Not for much longer. The drug has stopped working now and a scan next week will reveal how far my disease has spread. I’m definitely not going to live long enough to see the assisted dying bill become law. So if my life becomes unbearably painful and I long for a quick, pain-free death, I will have to go to Dignitas in Switzerland, alone.

Some members of the House of Lords are doing their very best right now to prevent any change in the current messy, cruel criminal law. Which means they will force more families to watch the terminally ill people they love and care for spend hours, sometimes days and weeks, dying slowly in agony, when even the best palliative care fails to alleviate their pain.

Or, if patients are rich enough, and desperately need assistance to die speedily and free of pain, it means they are flying alone to die in Dignitas, in Switzerland, unable to say their last goodbye to those they love because the current cruel criminal law means their loved ones would then be investigated by the police for murder.

And these lords are not being honest. The real motive behind these 1,000 amendments is not to improve the bill but to block it. The truth is that none of the amendments they propose would enable them to vote for the bill because they oppose it on principle. They may be personal religious principles they are forcing on non-believers. (The former archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, not himself a lord, has instructed all Catholics to lobby against the bill.) They may be disability campaigners who believe, quite wrongly, that the bill will apply pressure to disabled people when it applies only to terminally ill people like me, with six months or less to live. Or they may think the conditions may change, when other countries like Australia prove they don’t and haven’t.

I have received so many tragic stories about suicides, about patients begging for help to die, about loving families feeling helpless facing this terrible suffering.

I received this most recently: “I am so delighted you’re still around to fight our good fight. I become angry when presumptuous people assume they know what's best for the rest of us. I’m now on the final lap – it can’t come a moment too soon. Eager to embrace the void with enthusiasm. The bliss of no more pain.”

These are the voices the lords have decided to ignore while places around the world, including Scotland and the Isle of Man, are reforming their own old inhumane laws.

No change in the law can come in time for me. I always knew that. But on the third anniversary of my own diagnosis all I ask is that future generations be given the confidence and hope of a fast, pain-free death when they need it most.

Photograph by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images