Man’s VAD plea following sister’s slow, painful death

Watching his sister’s slow and agonising death has led one Queensland man to make a passionate plea on voluntary assisted dying.

Jon Adams still has nightmares about his sister’s dying days spent in severe pain, pleading with doctors to let her die.

Gay Rayner, 57, had stage 4 cancer and was in pain so excruciating that she had hallucinations in her final days of life in a Brisbane hospital in 2007.

“I could hear these bloodcurdling screams … and then I realised these screams were from my sister, a tumour in her spine had ruptured so she was arched on the bed, only her feet and head were touching the bed,” Mr Adams said.

“I went running out of the room because I couldn’t take it any more and I was 80m away and could still hear her. I literally ran from the hospital and I was so traumatised I couldn’t go back to the hospital the following day.”

Jon Adams pictured his home in Gordon Park. Picture: Josh Woning

Mr Adams stressed the doctors did everything they could to help his sister but her pain was unable to be managed in the months prior to her death.

His sister’s dying words were ‘you promised me it wouldn’t be like this’.

“The nurse said to me that she had been working in palliative care for 12 years and she had never seen a death so grotesque,” Mr Adams said.

Gay Rayner with family during her final weeks of life. Picture: supplied

“Our health system let her down, and Gay was denied the right to die peacefully and with dignity.

“Had Gay been aloud to take advantage of VAD my family would have gathered around, said our goodbyes and she could have just drifted off peacefully.”

Neil Jackson, 61, said it was agony watching his wife Nicol suffer through Motor Neurone Disease for two years before she passed away at age 50 in 2011.

Nicol Jackson pictured with husband Neil before she died from MND in 2011. Picture: supplied

For the mother-of-four and avid cyclist, the diagnosis was devastating.

“From her first diagnosis, she said to me ‘you and the girls are going to go through sheer hell’ and she wanted to go straight away because the outcome was that she was going to choke on her own salvia,” Mr Jackson said.

“There was nothing I could do and nothing that she could do other than to suffer. She wanted out straight away, and that’s from a woman who jumped out of planes, she was a very courageous woman.”

In a powerful submission during the government’s public hearings into VAD, Mr Jackson said people couldn’t understand how important access to VAD was until they were put in a situation where someone they loved needed it.

Neil Jackson said he does not want other families to suffer in the way his family did. Picture: supplied

“I don’t feel that anyone should have to go through what we had to go through as a family,” he said.

“All my wife needed was to have the key to her own salvation.”

The harrowing stories come as the Queensland Government introduced historic VAD legislation to parliament on Monday.