‘Get the pillow ready’ email is used to end woman’s life

A CHRISTIAN woman aged 74 is to have her life ended in hospital because of an email she wrote more than four years ago after watching a TV programme on dementia.

She sent a message to her daughter which asked ‘did you see that thing on dementia?’ and added: ‘Get the pillow ready if I get that way!’

Yesterday a judge in the Court of Protection ruled that the email amounted to a ‘significant’ record of the woman’s views on what should happen to her if she lost the ability to make decisions for herself.

She has slipped into a near-coma following a fall last year, and Mr Justice Hayden backed the daughter’s request for withdrawal of the nutrition and hydration tubes that have been keeping her alive. He made his decision despite the opposition of the Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and the doubts of the woman’s sisters.

The case is the latest in a series in which Court of Protection judges have decided that disputes over the treatment of desperately ill or disabled people should end in the withdrawal of medical treatment and death.

The woman, who the judge said was a Methodist, has been named only as Mrs P. He said the chances of her condition improving were limited, although she could expect to live on for between three and five years if treatment continued.

The email to her daughter from May 2013 read in part: ‘Did you see that thing on dementia? Made me think of Dad and what a travesty of life his last years were. I am still haunted by how he ended up. Get the pillow ready if I get that way!’

Mr Justice Hayden said lawyers for the NHS Trust and the Official Solicitor, who was speaking for the woman, argued that the email might only be regarded as recording a meaningless throwaway remark such as ‘take me out and shoot me’.

But he said the woman had been distressed by the decline and death of her father, and the email was a powerful indicator of her wishes.

In rejecting the NHS Trust call for a declaration that it was in her best interests to be kept alive by nutrition and hydration by tube, the judge said she ‘would have found her present circumstances not only intolerable but humiliating’.