Brittany Maynard’s death may help usher in a right-to-die option for terminally ill patients in the Golden State

The call comes on your cell when you least expect it, while in line at Peet’s Coffee. The doctor, a specialist from out of town, says “The telephone isn’t the ideal way to deliver test results, but… ” You urge him to proceed. So, he tells you about your brain cancer.

It has metastasized with a vengeance.

His words are both shocking and anticipated. You know you are hearing your own death sentence.

You have fought valiantly for years to be rid of this disease. You’ve endured the onslaught of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. Your loved ones rallied in support. You’ve done everything you can to continue living fully. Now, you find yourself at a new stage, with six months to live. You’re aware that people who die with your disease may face distressing events before the end: seizures, loss of functions, dementia, anguish and undeniable pain.

What are your options in the above hypothetical?

In California, you could choose ever-more-aggressive interventions in the unlikely hope of a cure. You could green-light a medical trial and perhaps extend your life, and aid science. You could choose palliative care and hospice, in the unassailable theory they may provide you a gentler exit. You could even exercise your right to refuse food and drink, a difficult path that leads to death in seven to 10 days.

Or you could move to Oregon. There, you would have an extra option. You could choose to end your own life, at the time and in the place of your choosing, with legally prescribed, fast-acting barbiturates provided by a doctor.

As of right now, this final option is illegal in California. In fact, your loved ones could face criminal prosecution for aiding you in pursuit of it here.

But all this may be changing.

Just last week, state senators Bill Monning, D-Carmel, and Lois Wolk, D-Davis, announced legislation that would bring an “end-of-life choices” law to California. The law would be fundamentally like Oregon’s 1997 Death With Dignity Act – requiring an adult patient to have residency in the state and two doctors in agreement that he or she has less than six months to live and full mental competency. Other safeguards for patients and physicians will also be folded in.

Wolk, the state senate’s new majority whip, and Monning, the majority leader, will likely face a tough battle this time.

So why introduce it now?

Because of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old East Bay newlywed who, diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer last spring, became the face of a movement when she chose to relocate with her husband to Oregon to end her life under that state’s Death With Dignity Act.

“My family and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion,” she wrote in an essay for CNN. “There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left.”

A month after Maynard’s November death, the already substantial public support for Death with Dignity took a significant bounce. A Harris Poll found that 74 percent of American adults now believe terminally ill patients in great pain should have the right to bring their lives to a close. Even “physician-assisted suicide” – a term controversial in right-to-die circles – now has a 72-percent favorable rating.

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With her short brown hair, eloquent eyes and gracious smile, Jennifer Glass welcomed a rain-soaked reporter into her San Mateo home last month. The warm environs seemed to alleviate the difficulty in speaking openly about the topic at hand: Glass’ late-stage lung cancer and probable death from the disease.

A formidable communications professional during her working career – with stints at Oracle, Intuit, Sony and Facebook – Glass married the man of her dreams, Harlan Seymour, in August of 2012. Four months later, while giving her a back rub, Seymour found a lump on her neck that felt “like little peas in a row.”

Glass was soon discovered to have Stage IIIB lung cancer (not smoking related) that had metastasized to the lymph nodes in her neck. At the time of her diagnosis, the American Cancer Society estimated the likelihood of her five-year survival rate at just 5 percent. The then 49-year-old underwent radiation and two aggressive rounds of chemotherapy, causing her to lose her thick brown hair. Her cancer is, thankfully, now in a period of “treated containment.” She takes the oral chemotherapy drug Tarceva that allows “two to three good hours” per day, she says. Tarceva tends to be effective for two to four years before cancer mutates around it.

Glass has strong beliefs about how she wants to go when her time comes. “I believe I should have the legal choice to end my life calmly, peacefully and with dignity,” she said.

When diagnosed, Glass contacted Compassion & Choices – responsible for creating and passing Oregon’s Death With Dignity Actmore than 17 years ago. A volunteer came to her home and explained advance-care directives, the role of hospice and what was legal in California when it comes to the end of life.

After her marathon cancer treatment was completed, Glass contacted Compassion & Choices a second time and asked how she could help them make aid in dying legal in California.

People like Glass don’t much like the word suicide – as in physician-assisted suicide. Suicidal people want to die, she said. “I’m doing everything I can to live! But I want control over my death if it’s going to go in a really ugly way.”

Glass admitted to a kind of black market that exists in states where physician-assisted dying is illegal. “Since becoming part of the cancer community, I’ve known people who are doing whatever they think it’s going to take to end their lives when they want to, including hoarding pills.”

If her disease runs its course, Glass says she knows what it would take to move to Oregon and, like Maynard, take the steps necessary for self-administration of a lethal prescription.

“But I really hope it doesn’t come to a decision where I have to leave my home,” she said. “Particularly because if it comes to that, it’s a decision I’m going to have to make when I’m already very sick.”

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Toni Broaddus entered Café Bernardo near the California State Capitol on K Street, primed for her first in a long string of meetings scheduled that day with legislators, staffers and local officials. It was Nov. 19, 2014 – the date would have marked Brittany Maynard’s 30th birthday.

“Brittany’s story really galvanized the movement,” said Broaddus, an attorney and social-justice advocate who now directs the Compassion & Choices campaign in California.

Broaddus, previously a leader in the state’s marriage-equality movement, said Compassion & Choices has set a goal of having California join the five other states in the country – Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico – that have legalized aid in dying. The group plans to assist in the passage of California legislation or mount a grassroots effort to get the matter put before voters in 2016.

Attempts to legalize assisted dying in California have been beaten back many times over, thanks to fierce opposition from organizations like the Catholic Church, with its moral authority, and the California Medical Association, with its well-financed lobby. In 1992, the statewide ballot measure Proposition 161 went down with 46 percent of the vote.

The most recent legislative attempt, Assembly Bill 374 by Assemblywoman Patty Berg, was taken off the table for lack of support at the end of the 2007 session. Famously, the bill had preachers speaking out in opposition from the pulpits in California.

The powerful California Medical Association is predicted to oppose again, though a spokesperson said the group hadn’t yet taken a position. The organization, which represents 30 percent of the state’s physicians, has claimed assisting in a death conflicts with a doctor’s ethical responsibility to “do no harm.”

Also expected to oppose Wolk’s legislation are some in the disability-rights community, who say such a law could open up the potential for abuse by insurers or family members. Patients might be pushed to an early death for the convenience of others, they say.

Why is it so difficult for modern society to succeed at delivering a “good death,” when it’s something most everybody wants?

In his recent bestseller Being Mortal, Atul Gawande lays out the limits of medicine and the inadequacies of medical school in preparing physicians to help patients deal with the stark reality of death. Doctors have been trained to find cures and “to win,” he writes.

Still, some see a shift occurring in the end-of-life landscape – perhaps because members of an aging baby-boomer population have begun to see their final acts in sight. Indeed, more doctors are now being trained in palliative care, which focuses on pain relief over cures for terminally ill patients.

Meanwhile, over to the side, is the more controversial subject of a California law that would allow people who meet its dire criteria to self-administer lethal prescription drugs.

Could a shift be occurring there, too?

Wolk believes the answer is yes.

“We have to learn. Doctors have to learn. At the end of life, there is a range of things that can happen. We haven’t wanted to think about that. But it’s time.”

Like Maynard, Jennifer Glass seems utterly brave and self-aware as she moves forward and attempts to live a full life regardless of the harsh lesson mortality threatens to teach her. A few weeks shy of a late December CT scan to check for recurrence of her lung cancer, she said, “I feel fine now. But any minute things could go a different way.

“My great hope is that, in the next 12 to 24 months, if my disease runs its course, then I will have the legal option to procure prescribed medicine and end my life, by my own choice, by my own hand, legally, in my own home.”

And then, as if preparing for an upcoming debate, Glass posed a question to an imagined opponent of a California end-of-life choices law: “Nobody’s saying you have to do this if you don’t want to do it,” she said, “But who are you to say that I can’t?”

MELINDA WALSH is the former editor of the Sacramento News & Review.