Emily has been given six months to live and is trying to spend as much time as possible with her two children, who are naturally devastated their mother is dying. In the recent school holidays, the 42-yearold took her daughter, 14, and son, 11, to Kāpiti Island for the day. Another goal is to go to Tekapo to see the night sky.
But most of the time Emily ‒ a single parent ‒ is forced to deal with the bone-aching fatigue of metastasised breast cancer and what she has to do, and cannot do, to get through her day. Twice a week, she taxis to a Wellington pharmacy to get her opioid painkillers and chemotherapy pill – she isn’t allowed to drive. Often, the script is not correctly filled out due to errors at the pharmacy or by her GP. On a recent trip, Emily “turned on the waterworks’’.
“I told them: ‘I’ve got a terminal illness so I’ve got limited life left. I do not want to stand in this pharmacy for 20 minutes, twice a week, looking at you. I don’t want to do that’.’’
The Te Omanga Hospice sits in manicured grounds down a long driveway in Lower Hutt. It’s a sanctuary for Emily (not her real name), who goes there once a week for everything from counselling and art therapy to social catch-ups. On a sunny morning in late April, she sits in one of the common rooms with her friend Heather, a 75-year-old who is also terminally ill with cancer, and they talk about what it is like to be dying in Aotearoa today.
Hospice New Zealand is about to undertake a review to highlight what it’s like to interact with society when you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Aiming for 1000 responses, it will ask patients and their carers about dealing with everything from banks and health providers to telco companies and schools in the final days, weeks and months of life. It wants to know how well the dying are treated in New Zealand and will use the “dying reviews” to encourage the country to reconsider what it means to enable “dying well”.
Hospice’s conversations precede the upcoming mandatory review of the End of Life Choice Act, which took
