I’ve been time travelling in my own head in recent weeks. Why is it so important to do the right thing for me? This follows a busy month with a number of conference presentations which led to a roller-coaster of emotions. The highs of being with like-minded individuals and being accepted by my new tribe. The lows of being iced by some members of my old tribe. A time to reflect on my experience of being ‘the other’. Children do not choose where they are born or to which family they belong to. They have no choice in the matter. The process of conception is close to miraculous, two tiny collections of DNA are joined together and become an unique recipe for a potential human being. Nine months of incubation later and the accident of birth occurs.

I was born to immigrant parents. My parents were also children of immigrants. Not uncommon in the Hakka people, the guest people, the nomads of the Han Chinese. We were born in countries where we were part of a minority group. We looked different to our peers, to our teachers, to most of the population. In some of my past presentations I had shown an image of a brown and white speckled sea cucumber. This represented my classmates at school in the early 1980’s in Hawkes Bay in New Zealand. If you looked closely at the sea cucumber you might notice a single yellow dot. That dot represented me, amongst my brown and white classmates. The next image I put up was of the same sea cucumber two years later, (circa 1982) which I had subtly changed to include two more yellow dots. These represented my brother and cousin who joined me at the same school.

Did my own parents face a similar situation in their childhoods? Growing up as yellow specks on different coloured sea cucumbers? Did they also grow up in-between cultures like I did. At school it was full immersion in the Kiwi culture. As soon as I got home it was back to the traditional Chinese lifestyle, speaking Mandarin, eating Chinese food, staying up late compared to all my school mates. Some immigrants have an easier time of assimilating than others. It helps if you look like the local flora and fauna, but if your hair is a different colour, if your eyes are a different shape, if your skin is a different colour, then it can be impossible to hide in a crowd. You are reminded of the stark differences every time you look in a mirror. In some places you travel to, you experience the strange feeling of everyone staring at you as if you are a zoo animal. In the captivity of keepers who have different sets of values than your own place of origin. You are warned by your parents not to speak your first language when we go to see Aunty Pam. She doesn’t like people speaking anything but English around her, other than that she’s been a great family friend for many years. We always visited her every Christmas. It was hard to fit in when I was different to everyone else. It was out of my control, I had no choice in the matter, I just had to live the experience. I was an in-betweener, bridging the two cultures while not feeling fully accepted by either of them. Maybe that had something to do with my choice of career, Palliative Care bridges the divide between the keeping alive/standard healthcare and the care of the dying. I had no control over the start of my story, but I did take control of the career part of my life.

A little girl named Eve had no choice when it came to where she was born. A nice enough Australian town, the name of which I don’t recall. As an infant she required a blood transfusion, a potentially life-saving treatment. Little did she know that the procedure which had saved her life, would become a source of suffering in a fully holistic fashion. In the early 1980’s initially no-one knew about retroviruses like HIV, the whole world would be made aware when the AIDS epidemic surfaced. Fear of the partially known led to a horrible period for AIDS victims who were treated poorly. Sick, dying people were ostracised by some people with long necks who had their heads partially stuck in the sand. Refusing to take in the small amounts of scientific knowledge available. The afflicted patients who were dying distressing deaths were made to feel worse by the way that people treated them. Some patients who went to hospital were not treated any better, with staff refusing to care for them as they were afraid of catching the illness, a dereliction of duty which caused so much pain. Abandonment and rejection at the time care was most needed was what people dying of AIDS had to suffer. Horrid enough for adults to bear let alone a little toddler. That’s what Eve and her family had to deal with in the early 1980’s in her home town. Fear and ignorance driven bigotry which succeeded in driving little Eve and her family out of town, actually out of country. They decided to become immigrants and moved to Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.

I never met Eve or her family but they became famous in the months before they arrived. Stories on the national news bulletins prepared us for her arrival. She would be moving to Hawkes Bay and we would give her a warm Kiwi welcome. She would become one of our own. It wasn’t her fault that she had needed a blood transfusion. The doctors and nurses treating her at the time didn’t know about blood-borne retroviruses. The importance of doing the right thing was talked about every night on the news. We would try our best to give little Eve as normal a childhood as possible. She might’ve started off somewhere else but we would receive her in time to correct her accent. She would grow up knowing who really invented Pavlova. She would become a little Kiwi kid with a Hawkes Bay accent, just like my own. We would show Eve and her family acceptance and basic human decency. We would do the right thing.

Over the past three years I have heard of instances in which people have acted poorly towards dying patients who have legally chosen to have an assisted death. My sources have been patients, their family, their doctors and my own eyes and ears. For some reason unbeknownst to me people see the words, ‘assisted dying’ and somehow the dying part gets lost in the red(?) haze that clouds their vision. In what healthcare institution is it okay to treat people impolitely and without respect. How would you like it if you were treated like a child by someone who is supposed to be improving your quality of life? Unfortunately, despite the almost flat earth beliefs of some of my palliative care colleagues, nasty stuff is happening to patients who have chosen an assisted dying. They have been treated as if they were AIDS patients, as if they were modern day lepers. How can this behaviour be justified by some of the most religious people in the country? How does this sit with their personal values? What would their one witness think? Can they hear the command(ment)s or is there too much sand in their ears? Too much grand in their fears? Ostracism directly harms its victims. Ostrichism directly harms core inner values. You didn’t go to law school, you don’t sit on a bench professionally. What gives you the right to judge someone making a legal choice asked to be made available by the majority of our society? Are you doing the right thing? For the patient in front of you? For yourself and your values? Please don’t make a hard situation even worse for someone who modern medicine cannot save. The control of their own life has been taken away, but no-one should be allowed to take away the control of their own death. It’s their life, not our life. They were not born yesterday, but they might die tomorrow. Treat them with respect. Choose to act out of love, not fear.