Yes. And very recently too.
A much loved woman whose symptoms were tut tutted by her male G.P. ( A bit of sciatica.) Found eventually to have inoperable spinal tumours. She wanted to see as much of her young grandchildren as she could and particularly wanted a last Christmas with them. So she asked to go home. More easily said than done for the rest of us, as she lived in a small terrace house with narrow stairs and no downstairs toilet or shower. Waiting weeks for assessments etc before we could bring her home while she bed blocked.
Due to her condition and the seeming inability to get her pain relief correct she was shunted back and forth, between an overcrowded, underfunded, understaffed A and E, dirty NHS ward, a local hospice that depends upon charitable donations to function, and home with a comode and specialised bed in the living room, next to the tiny kitchen. She caught COVID and pneumonia somewhere along the way. Shitty, inadequate medical support, carers who often never turned up to help, and a traumatised family feeling powerless looking on as she screamed for the pain to stop due to poor medication administration. Four months of this she went through.
Had she had Good Quality Palliative Care, which all the Be Kinders seem to avoid discussing, she wouldn't have been screaming to die. She would have been comfortable, clean, treated with dignity and respect, and died peacefully and not in pain. IF all that good care had been in place for her. IF adequate checks and balances had been in place as to her capacity and what she wanted, then assisted dying may well have been her choice and only her choice at some point after her last Christmas. As it was, she was pleading for death in November to spare her family from the distress as well as her own. That should not be the reason for such an Act. It should be about patient choice, not escape from llife because of lack of good pain free palliative care.
It should not come down to a medic saying: you have two choices: crap care and pain and a distressed family OR you can be helped to pop your clogs now.
So do sod off those with the emotive rhetoric as though the rest of us have no experience of this and not thought about it. We aren't the cruel ones in this debate. It's not the right to die, being discussed ffs. it's the poor quality of the proposed legislation many are concerned about. Compounded by the current poor quality of palliative care, and other pressures, that may adversely influence someones decision to die before they really want to.
All I am concerned about is that it is a person's own choice and not because they no longer feel valued by society, or because of inadequate care and pain, and that they are treated with dignity and respect without undue influence or pressure.