SPRINGFIELD — Carolyn Pointer doesn’t want to die like her father did — after suffering through hours of nonstop seizures and weeks of pain and discomfort related to brain cancer that was diagnosed a year earlier.

“It was dreadful,” said Pointer, 44, a Springfield resident whose father, a 69-year-old retired naval officer and former clinical dietitian, died three years ago in Virginia.

Palliative and hospice care often fell short in relieving his suffering, Pointer said.

“I could see my dad was not at ease after three months of being bedbound,” she said. “I wanted an easy end to his suffering for him.”

That experience made Pointer, who was diagnosed two years ago with brain cancer, a supporter of an option now available for terminal patients in Oregon, eight other states and the District of Columbia — but not Virginia or Illinois.

It’s called “medical aid in dying” or “voluntary assisted dying” by supporters. Opponents call it “physician-assisted suicide.”

Oregon, the model for the other laws, allows adults 18 and older who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness expected to lead to death within six months to be prescribed a fatal dose of medicine that patients must take themselves.

The compounded medicine is half a glass of liquid that patients swallow. The medicine puts patients to sleep in a few minutes and leads to death in about a half-hour.

Besides Oregon, medical aid in dying, with similar rules and provisions, is available in D.C. and the states of California, Colorado, Montana, Vermont, Washington state and, most recently, Hawaii, Maine and New Jersey — three states that enacted laws this year.

With interest and support growing for such a law in Illinois, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine’s medical humanities department has invited a retired family physician who used the Oregon law to serve dying patients for 13 years to speak about his experience.

The free seminar, featuring Dr. David Grube, will begin at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in the school’s South Auditorium, 801 N. Rutledge St.

In a phone interview last week, Grube said Oregon’s medical-aid-in-dying option is used relatively infrequently.

A report from the Oregon Health Authority, a part of the state’s government, says 168 people in Oregon died in 2018 ingesting the prescribed medications, including 11 who had received prescriptions in previous years. About 80% of the 168 who died were 65 or older, and 62% had cancer.

Almost two out of every 10 people prescribed the medications in 2018 didn’t take them and died from other causes, the report said.

The estimated rate of deaths associated with the medical-aid-in-dying option in Oregon was 45.9 per 10,000 total deaths.

Grube, 72, who retired from practice in 2012, said the law fulfills its intended purpose in Oregon, a state of 4.2 million people that is one-third the size of Illinois.

“If Illinois gets this law, the same number of people are going to die, because all of these people are dying, but there will be less suffering,” he said. “That’s what we see in Oregon and the other areas where this is authorized.”

For those wanting to learn more before Thursday, Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, which took effect in 1997, will be the topic of a free showing of the award-winning documentary, “How to Die in Oregon” at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13, at the Abraham Lincoln Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 745 Woodside Road. A discussion will follow the 107-minute film.

‘I would rather die with peace’

Pointer said the earlier stage of her cancer at diagnosis than her father’s cancer — as well as the surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment she received in Bethesda, Maryland, and Springfield — may give her at least 10 more years to live.

But Pointer, a lawyer, assistant professor in the medical school’s medical humanities department and married mother of 7-year-old twins and a 10-year-old, said she wants more control over the end of her life than her father had.

“I don’t want my children to watch me die like that,” Pointer said. “I want to control the ‘how’ and ‘when,’ so my kids never see me like that. I would rather die with peace. I hope I have years to make happy memories with them, like a trip to Disneyland — not them watching mom in pain.”

Dr. Christine Todd, chairwoman of the medical humanities department, said she invited Grube to give SIU medical students, doctors from the area and other health professionals a chance to hear firsthand from someone who has used a medical-aid-in-dying law in practice.

Grube is national medical director for Compassion & Choices, an Oregon-based group that advocates for medical-aid-in-dying legislation. The group says on its website that it “embraces expanded options for compassionate dying.”

Todd said Gube’s talk is “sort of ‘step one’ in an educational push to just make this subject something we can talk about calmly.”

SIU School of Medicine hasn’t taken a position on a potential medical-aid-in-dying law for Illinois, SIU spokeswoman Rikeesha Phelon said.

The public is welcome to attend the 60- to 90-minute session, but Phelon said the forum mainly is intended to “provide medical students and providers with an opportunity to discuss the ethical issues of medical aid in dying and to hear the perspective of a provider who can discuss the conceptual and practical implications.”

Todd, an internist, has practiced medicine for 22 years and works part-time as a hospitalist at Memorial Medical Center. She said she has had “more and more patients ask me” if medical aid in dying is available in Illinois.

Todd said she personally leans toward supporting such a law.

“I’ve had patients who are very angry that it was not available and say, ‘If I lived in Oregon, I would be in charge of my own life, but I guess I’m not here in Illinois,'” she said. “Patients are bringing this into the arena, and so I think doctors have to have some well-informed thinking process around it.”

The debate in America’s medical community on the issue has focused on the conflict between the ethical principle of preserving a patient’s autonomy and a doctor’s pledge to “do no harm,” Todd said.

“Do we want patients to be in control of the last phase of their life, which is the dying process?” she asked. “In a lot of ways, the medical culture has only opened up a few, very prescribed routes in which patients are able to choose what happens to them at the end of their life. I think a valid question is: ‘Who are we to do that?’ Why can’t patients choose the route they would like to choose based on their own values and beliefs and their own assessment of their quality of life?

“And as physicians, should we not be advocating for them to do what they would like to do?”