A woman in New Jersey is fighting to pass a “Right to Die” law in her state after watching her husband’s painful death from pancreatic cancer. (Photo: FS Productions)

A New Jersey operating room nurse is fighting for a medical-aid-in-dying bill in her state after watching her husband die of pancreatic cancer.

Debra Dunn tells Yahoo Lifestyle that her husband, Herb, was diagnosed with the disease in March 2013 after he inexplicably began losing weight. “He had a liver biopsy, which showed that the cancer had metastasized already,” she said. Herb went to an oncologist, who recommended chemotherapy, even though “he wasn’t sure it would be helpful,” Dunn says.

Herb underwent chemotherapy for two months, which didn’t shrink his tumor. “The symptoms he was having were getting worse and worse,” Dunn says, noting that Herb was losing about 4 pounds a week. Herb’s tumor was pressing on his small intestine, preventing food from getting to his stomach, and he ended up spending a month in the hospital. “He wasn’t able to eat food, because nothing was getting by,” Dunn says. Doctors tried to put in a stent to open up his intestine, but it didn’t work.

“They put a feeding tube into his stomach — not to feed him but to relieve the buildup of bile, fluid, and gastric juices,” Dunn says. “Whatever he drank, he would swallow it, and you would watch it come right out and go into a bag. He had no bowel movement for four months. Things weren’t able to even get in.”

Herb was eventually sent home and put on total parenteral nutrition, which is a food substance in fluid form that’s given to patients intravenously. “Throughout the night, he got ‘fed,’” Dunn says. He also used a fentanyl patch for pain, but it didn’t seem to help much. “He had a lot of pain,” Dunn says. “Pain medications take the edge off the pain and make you go to sleep, but they really don’t take away the pain.”

Eventually, Herb’s oncologist said treatment was no longer working. “We had to stop chemo, which was a death sentence,” Dunn says. “Herb went into hospice in our house. A hospital bed was brought into the house, and I slept on the couch downstairs with him.”

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Herb began hallucinating, and “he wasn’t safe by himself,” Dunn says. “He couldn’t get to the bathroom and eventually began peeing in a urinal at the bedside.” He was put on morphine, but that also didn’t seem to help. “It wasn’t staying in his system,” Dunn says. “Toward the end, he was very spastic — he would have a glass of water in his hand, and it would go flying. His body was shutting down; He was actively dying.”

Since none of the nutrition was reaching his system, Dunn says her husband was also “very emaciated” and weak. “Watching his body become a stick was mentally debilitating for him,” she tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Dunn says that Herb was “very upset” about the downward spiral. “It was really hard for him to watch his body close down.”

The day he died, Dunn says she checked his pulse at 1 a.m. and noted that it was faint. By 3 a.m., he was gone.

Dunn says she began seeing a therapist and contemplating a way to heal. “It was horrible how my husband died — I needed to do something,” she says. She eventually discovered Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit organization that advocates for access to medical aid in dying, and was connected with someone in her state.

Since then, she’s been lobbying for the passage of the Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, which would allow mentally capable, terminally ill adults with six months or less to live to have the option to obtain and take prescription medication that would allow them to die in their sleep if their suffering became unbearable. The act was introduced in 2012 but has not been brought to the New Jersey Assembly and Senate floors for a vote, even though the most recent Rutgers-Eagleton state poll shows that 63 percent of state voters support medical aid in dying.

Dunn urges her state legislators to “pull up their bootstraps and stand up for something that’s right.” She also encourages people to think about how they would feel if their loved one was in the same situation Herb was in. “Wouldn’t you want to help them in that effort?” she says.

She recently wrote an op-ed in the Star-Ledger pleading her case as well.

“I need this bill to pass,” Dunn says. “I promised my husband he would not suffer, and I failed because he did. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m doing work on my husband’s behalf for what I couldn’t do when he was dying. This work means a lot to me.”

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