“The reason I started blogging and Twitter was the story of a patient I heard from a helper. The woman, who is still young, has been fighting illness since she was born with cerebral palsy. She seems to have difficulty in pronouncing words and can express her feelings only occasionally.”
“In short, I’m scared to die slowly. The popular saying is “I want to die when I die”. It’s scary just to imagine that you are suffocating…ALS is truly unpredictable. But I know I can’t die unless my lung function fails. The contradiction cannot be resolved.”
In a tweet posted on July 27, Shintaro Ishihara called ALS an “occupational disease”, and some on Twitter pointed out that “business disease” refers to “an intractable disease that has been thought to come at the expense of bad business,” and was at best a rude or derogatory term.
“It’s a sad story, but I haven’t accepted my illness yet. It’s been nearly seven years.”
Health experts are calling the case of two doctors arrested last week on suspicion of assisting in the death of a 51-year-old woman with ALS “fundamentally different” from past euthanasia cases that led to other doctors’ convictions for murder in Japan, because she allegedly asked them to kill her for money on Twitter.
The then attending doctor of Yuri Hayashi declined the referral request because of skepticism about the fact that the patient did not specify the address of the hospital the doctor in question was working at, informed sources said.
In a blog post on June 4 2018 entitled ‘View of life and death and euthanasia’, Hayashi notices that the use of respirators in Europe and America is low, although praises that ventilators are at least available in Japan as it seems to signify that at since it is an option that it “means that such an environment is in place.”
On May 27 2018, Hayashi wrote a blog post entitled ‘Life saved by Euthanasia’: Hayashi seems to suggest that a person who is considering ending their life because of a condition like ALS, might have better mental health if they don’t “have to hurry and commit suicide.”
“I wanted to forget everything for a while (though I couldn’t do that), so I kept myself in my shell. I can’t do anything, but I just breathe by myself. Are you doing your best? This body is regrettable and dear. But don’t live with this body. I don’t think I’m alive.”
After announcing her intentions to commit suicide it seems that Hayashi felt she was losing friends. On May 9 2018 she published this, of which one possible translation of the blog post title would be ‘There is nothing to fear from the untouched god’:
Barrier Free Japan