Assisted suicide denied, Martina Oppelli’s decision: “I’m going to Switzerland”

The commission responsible for assigning the medically assisted suicide procedure expressed a negative opinion, because the 49-year-old from Trieste is not attached to a machine that keeps her alive

TRIESTE – “I’m exhausted, worn out. I am full of life”. Thus Martina Oppelli, today in a press conference with the president of the Luca Coscioni association, Filomena Gallo, explains the situation that led her to give up the fight against the Italian institutions that continue to place obstacles to the exercise of the right to ‘end of life’, deciding to resort to euthanasia in Switzerland.
Oppelli suffers, he explains, from the same incurable pathology (multiple sclerosis), the same total immobility and total dependence from the assistance of other people, the same unbearable pain and suffering partially counteracted by powerful painkillers, the same full capacity for understanding and will.

And yet, unlike her fellow citizen Anna (fictitious name), the commission of the Giuliano Isontina University Health Authority responsible for assigning the medically assisted suicide procedure, expressed a negative opinion, because the requirement is missing of ‘life-sustaining treatment’. That is, the 49-year-old from Trieste is not attached to a machine that keeps her alive. Oppelli herself, however, explains how without human assistance 24 hours a day, she would in fact die, as almost happened when she was abandoned for 16 hours in bed, alone at home, by an irresponsible caregiver. “No one heard me scream, I couldn’t even cry, because I would have suffocated on my own saliva– she says-. The first to arrive was the caregiver for the next shift. It rang, but I couldn’t open it. They found me among my feces and urine in bed, hungry, thirsty, stiff as pre-stressed concrete because I couldn’t take my medicines”.
She tells it in a faint voice, “because otherwise I’ll feel cough, and I can’t cough. This is why I have the ‘coughing machine’, a terrible thing that causes terrible pain in my trigeminal muscles, as if it were sucking my brain out”.
The woman specifies that she is not tired of life, but of pain and of suffering, which persists and becomes increasingly worse despite the excellent assistance he is receiving and the palliative care to which he has full access. He had a full life, thanks to readings and meetings with interesting people, even when the disease was already advanced, diagnosed in 2002, but with the first symptoms in ’99.

Since 2012, he continues “I need someone to put me to bed, turn me over and get me up in the morning; take me to the bathroom, brush my teeth, make me ‘presentable’, give me food and drink. But I can still work today, thanks to a voice interface on the computer. Just put me in front of the screen and turn on the PC, because I can’t, and move me, take me to the bathroom, when it’s time for a break.” And he concludes: “It is possible to live even with multiple sclerosis, and I tell everyone: try, it won’t be easy, it won’t get better, but when you can’t take it anymore there will be a way out”.
This way out, however, Martina Oppelli will find in Switzerland with the assistance of the Coscioni association, explains Gallo, because despite the rulings of the Constitutional Court, with the famous ‘Cappato ruling’ which prescribes when has the right to medically assisted suicide, the often restrictive interpretations of the ruling by institutions and officials still make it impossible to exercise this right. Neither Parliament, despite the constant requests of the Council and the President of the Republic, he concludes, has made any step forward towards an adequate law regulating the ‘end of life’.