Peter Dervin had spent all day by his son's side in Broomfield Hospital before he decided to get dinner. He pleaded with staff at the Essex facility not to leave his eldest child, Greg, alone in his absence. "They almost laughed at me and said, 'This is what we do. We're nurses and we look after patients'," Dervin recalls. Greg had been given lorazepam, an anxiety drug flagged by clinicians as leaving him prone to becoming unsteady and agitated.
Today I saw images of students leaving their school with their hands raised in the air, hours after cowering in fear and terror in barricaded classrooms. Nine dead and twenty-seven wounded in the tiny Rocky Mountain town of Tumbler Ridge. The mayor, Darryl Krakowka, said, "I have lived here for 18 years. I probably know every one of the victims." And this in Canada, which often seems to us Americans like a bastion of sanity and normalcy in comparison with our madness.
Sue Higgins says her breast cancer diagnosis was a shock and after time off for treatment she was nervous about her return to work. An online programme run by Trinity College Dublin proved an invaluable support system
For decades, the gold standard for the coma-induction phase of euthanasia was thiopental. It was swift, reliable, and highly concentrated and rapidly induced a deep coma. In 2011, however, the European Union banned the export of drugs used for capital punishment, including thiopental. In the wake of the ban, manufacturers withdrew or tightly controlled supplies to avoid association with executions, making the drug increasingly difficult to obtain. "Thiopental is very difficult to get now," Horikx said.
