Most of us hope and pray that we get to grow old; that we live out our years in as much happiness as can be obtained and perhaps peacefully slip away in our sleep when the time comes.
Sadly, that doesn’t go for everyone.
The heartbreaking story of 25-year-old Annaliese Holland should be a poignant reminder of that fact. Suffering with a debilitating, incurable medical condition, she revealed recently that she wants to die by voluntary assisted suicide.
Since she was a young child, Annaliese, from Australia, has been in and out of hospitals.
“I’ve been sick since being a child really, I lived in and out of the hospital ever since I went in for nine months,” she told news.com.au.
“It actually took until I transitioned to the adult hospital that we found the diagnosis, and it came back that I did have this autoimmune disease that was causing it all along.”
The disease in question is Autoimmune Autonomic Ganglionopathy (AAG), an extremely rare condition caused by the body’s own immune system mistakenly attacking the body, leading to a raft of terrible effects.
As per reports, just 100 people in the US are diagnosed with AAG each year. It’s not always terminal, though in Annaliese’s case it is.
The result is that a sufferer’s body can’t process the signals from nerves properly,Continue reading…
