Monday night, the day before my birthday, we went to St. Leonards for the SBS filming of Insight. Unfortunately and despite the topic information presented to us in emails, the show was not on euthanasia and was instead on end of life care. It was still interesting but a bit of surprise because no one knew about the change until 5 minutes before they started filming!
Interestingly, we learned at the filming that while everyone we waited with were people who sought out SBS to be on the show ("focus group" is what they called us), SBS had also sought and recruited people to be on the show ("panel members"). Of course, they knew what the topic would be! I don't think not telling us was on purpose but it meant that none of us from the focus group were prepared and none of us took part in the discussion.
The discussion tended to focus around choosing quantity or quality of life when faced with a terminal illness. There were two families there who discussed their decisions to fight or give up and be comfortable, and their stories were compelling. Even the man who chose to give up had fought it for a little while but he ultimately decided that he could possibly have a shorter life and a much less satisfying one because of the toll his body took under radiation treatment. He seemed to be at peace with things and it was really good to see that the palatial care he was receiving made him comfortable. He told us he had about six more months to live but that he felt normal and healthy which was the best thing he could ask for.
There was also a single woman there who found out she had ovarian cancer while on vacation and was told she had two-three weeks to live and that chemo wouldn't work with her kind of cancer. But she refused to placate and give up and insisted on getting chemo. Turned out that she has a special gene that makes her body particularly responsive to chemo therapy and even though this kind of cancer rarely responds to treatment, her's did. In fact, she made a full recovery after four rounds of chemo and surgery! After that, she decided to do away with doctors and now does her own research and only goes in for testing every few months which her and her doctor keeps a copy of the results and she makes the decisions regarding her care. It was truly fascinating to hear someone talk about taking control of their illness and making decisions for themselves which is totally legal. Several of the doctors taking part in the discussion agreed that often times doctors don't give their patients the best of care and that sometimes making decisions for yourself is the best course of action.
I don't want to ruin it all for you and tell you everything else that happened but it was a very beautiful program where people shared some truly touching stories about how they reached their decision on how they wished to die. One couple in particular told the story about their son Archy who is still just an infant and waiting for death with birth defects. It made me well up in tears as did quite a few other people in the audience.
As I said, we didn't really participate but it was a very good discussion and one I'm glad I didn't miss! Added bonus though: they paid everyone of us $50 for coming which meant we had extra cash to buy groceries last week! Score!
If you want to watch the episode, you can do so here. I don't know if it'll stream in the US because it's an Australian network but I suspect it will because they do so much international coverage. I, myself, haven't watched it yet so I don't know if they caught me on tape or not but since it was filmed live, I really hope they didn't catch me trying to hold in a yawn, fidgeting, compulsively scratching my face, shifting my weight, slumping or making a funny face! Because sitting still in a room for an hour while being filmed and not being able to contribute to the discussion is HARD! (If you couldn't figure it out, I'm in the grey and whit stripped shirt with Jeremy to my left.)
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