Last week, NDY ally Elaine Kolb performed an original song at the press conference hosted in part by Second Thoughts CT to highlight the dangers of the proposed CT assisted suicide legalization bill. Check out the video to see her speech and performance: https://youtu.be/AnaQhlmVt68
Video Transcript:
My name is Elaine Kolb. I'm 64 as in, "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me when I'm 64?" Well I am. When I first heard that song I thought it was gonna be a long time before I was 64, but here I am.
On September 30th, 1977, I was 28 years old and a stranger came up to me and grabbed me, attempted robbery, stabbed me in the back. Up till then I, if anything, I was abnormally healthy. I'd never even had a broken bone. The only time I was in the hospital was when I was born and to get my tonsils out.
There I was, almost died, had a spinal cord injury. They didn't think I'd ever walk again. Well, medicine is wonderful but there's a reason why they say it's still practicing. They are still practicing. They don't know. They're just trying to figure it out best they can and do the best they can under the circumstances. But they don't know. You can't say whether somebody's gonna live or die for sure. Some people seem to be just fine. My sister had surgery yesterday and last night they said she was just fine and then she had a blood clot and they took her back in for another surgery. And as far as I know, she's fine and in intensive care, but you don't know these things.
That's why this is so important because real people are in real agony at times and we don't know what to do. And we look to medical experts and they do the best they can, but they don't know either. This is very emotional for me because it was 15 years ago last Monday, March 10th, when my partner Patty Deke, we had been together for 11 and a half years, when she died at hospice in Branford. And it's one of the many blessings of my life that I got to be there holding her hand when she died. But she lived her whole life under a death sentence.
She was told from the time she was a little girl that she would not live very long and that she should expect to die young. She had something like muscular dystrophy which is one of those wonderful things that just gets worse all the time. Fight as hard as you can, do the very best you can. You will only get worse. And that was the life she lived and she had many complications and she almost died many times.
And so many people were so willing to say, "Don't you think you should let her go?" They would tell me, "Don't you think it's time to let her go?" And I would say, "You know what? If you're not gonna do everything you can to save her life, I want a different doctor. 'Cause she's fighting for her life and it's my job to back her up." ...
