‘I want to be able to say goodbye on my terms’, says Jann Stuckey
Former Queensland minister Jann Stuckey campaigned for voluntary assisted dying, never imagining she would be among those weighing their options when the law comes into force on January 1.
Former Queensland government minister Jann Stuckey used all her political nous to campaign for voluntary assisted dying, never imagining she would be among those weighing their options when the law comes into force on January 1.
But here she is on New Year’s Eve on the Gold Coast, the surf pounding outside her beachfront home, contemplating how to live with pancreatic cancer and if necessary to die on her own terms.
It’s a beast of a disease and Ms Stuckey, 67, is realistic about her prospects.
“Nobody is prepared to give me a prognosis, if you know what I mean,” said the one-time state Liberal National Party MP who held an array of portfolios under Campbell Newman.
“The doctors are treating me like they mean to save me, which I am very grateful for when everyone knows how challenging the five-year survival rate is.
“But with the new chemotherapy and treatment protocols they’re giving up to 50 per cent survival. So I’m putting myself in that category … I’m fighting because I want to live.”
Still, she’s deeply grateful VAD is about to become operative in Queensland – the fourth state after Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania to introduce assisted dying for the terminally ill – and has had the difficult conversation with her retired GP husband, Richard, and the family about using it if need be.
Prior to entering politics, Ms Stuckey was a nurse and knows all too well how trying end-stage cancer can be. She sees VAD as being part of her care plan, a break-glass measure that hopefully won’t be required.
“Knowing VAD is there as an option really takes some of the pressure off,” she told The Weekend Australian. “It’s a great unknown, dying. And you hear horror stories about pancreatic cancer and the pain. I’ve been a nurse myself and my husband has worked in aged care a lot, so we’re familiar with what happens to people at the end.
“While I have enormous respect for the palliative care nurses and the hospices that provide that care, remembering that voluntary assisted dying wasn’t available before, it is a preferred option for me to be able to say goodbye on the terms I want, and not totally drugged into a stupor where I don’t know what’s going on around me and my family have to watch a drawn-out death.”
A longtime advocate of voluntary euthanasia – though it was not LNP policy when she was in parliament – Ms Stuckey joined the lobby group Dying with Dignity Queensland and hit the hustings to drum up support for the VAD legislation that sailed through in September 2021, backed by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Richard had run for her Gold Coast seat of Currumbin as a pro-VAD independent at the 2020 state election after she stood down, tired of the bullying and abuse she had copped over a 16-year career.
Evidently, some of this emanated from her own side after she became one of only three LNPs MPs to vote in 2018 for legislation decriminalising abortion.
The VAD law that takes effect on New Year’s Day is not without its detractors: the Catholics complain of being blindsided by a requirement for faith-based hospitals and residential aged care homes to allow VAD on the premises if the patient concerned can’t be moved.
Blasting the Labor government for being “impervious to genuine discussion”, Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge has said service providers had no idea how the program would work.
An occasional churchgoer, Ms Stuckey calls herself a Christian. She believes in God, but not the churches’ line on euthanasia. If worst comes to worst she won’t be taking her own life – the cancer will have done that already.
She hasn’t spoken to her doctors yet about starting the process of applying for VAD because she’s still in the treatment phase, hopeful of beating the odds.
The diagnosis of her pancreatic cancer last July was a profound shock. A healthy and active woman, Ms Stuckey had no inkling she was ill; she was undergoing surgery for what was thought to be a blocked gallbladder when the peanut-sized primary tumour was detected.
Fortunately, the cancer had not spread. “I am very lucky in that respect,” she said. “If it had not been discovered when it was, I would have been dead in six or eight months.”
The new treatment protocols have changed what was once a virtual death sentence for pancreatic cancer to a fighting chance if caught early – but the regimen of chemo and surgery is punishing.
First, she underwent a crash course of chemotherapy, where she was infused for three days straight every fortnight. Beset by side-effects, she managed five of the six scheduled cycles.
Then they operated. In what’s known as a Whipple procedure, she spent eight hours on the table as surgeons removed parts of the pancreas, stomach, small bowel and as many lymph nodes as they could lay hands on. (Her gangrenous gallbladder had already been taken out.)
Now Ms Stuckey is preparing to start a follow-up round of chemo that will determine whether the cancer has been checked.
She is praying it works.
