British Woman With No Illness To End Life At Swiss Assisted Dying Clinic

A British woman with no terminal illness is to end her life by assisted dying in Switzerland this Friday, April 24.

Wendy Duffy, 56, has travelled to Swiss suicide clinic Pegasos because she says she is too heartbroken to live without her only son.

Marcus Duffy, 23, died four years ago after choking on a cherry tomato while asleep on the sofa at their home in the West Midlands.

Wendy, a former care worker, had made Marcus a sandwich, which included halved cherry tomatoes, while he was hungover on the sofa.

A piece of one of those cherry tomatoes became lodged in his windpipe while he was dozing and he died.

Wendy tried to take her own life following her son’s tragic death, but survived. She told doctors the grief has become unbearable and no amount of therapy or medication can fix it.

She has now been approved for assisted dying at Pegasos in Basel and has already paid the £10,000 fee to get it done.

It’s interesting how the whole thing works; the process is a physician-assisted death, meaning Wendy will actually administer the medication herself by turning a dial.

She told MailOnline: ‘Then – ding, ding, ding – within a minute, you are in a coma, and a minute after that, you are gone.’

Her family say they support her decision even though they are devastated to lose her.

Wendy says: ‘Pegasos have been in touch with them. I will call them. It will be a hard call where I’ll say goodbye and thank them. But they will get it. They know.

‘Honestly, 100%, they know that I’m not happy, that I don’t want to be here.’

Pegasos founder Ruedi Habegger said: ‘Wendy is very decided. I saw her at her hotel today, I had a long talk with her and with the psychiatrist that is going to see her a second time before the VAD [voluntary assisted death].

‘He is very confident that we are doing the right thing letting her go, that we should not stand in her way.

‘She is absolutely not in a depressive state. I’m very experienced in this field. There are no worries with Wendy, none at all.’

Coincidentally, a UK law that could permit physician-assisted death is being debated in the House of Lords tomorrow.

It’s a tricky one really. Wendy lost her only child which is a devastating wound that she cannot heal from, and is now taking the option to end her life on her own terms, and seems totally content with it.

On the other hand, she has other family she is leaving behind, and this is a pretty heartbreaking thing to leave them with. In a way, isn’t she inflicting a similar loss as the one she experienced on the rest of her family?

Come to think of it, it’s nowhere near as bad as losing your only child to a damn cherry tomato, in one of the most tragic, unimaginable deaths I think I’ve ever read about. The fact she made the sandwich that accidentally killed her son is just excruciating to think about. How are you supposed to get over something like that?

Fair play, Wendy. I guess there are some things we simply cannot come back from. RIP.

For the distraught family whose son was euthanised because he suffered from ‘seasonal depression’, click HERE.