Hospital staff have repeatedly pushed a Canadian man with disabilities to accept euthanasia. Now, he says, they are repeatedly asking him about suicide while cutting off basic needs like food and water.

“I’m doing my best to hang in, but I truly don’t know how much longer my body can hold on,” patient Roger Foley wrote in a message to The Dallas Express. “I think that there is no hope.”

Patient Roger Foley has spinocerebellar ataxia, a neurological disease that makes movement extremely difficult. Foley requires a medical lift to perform basic tasks like eating, drinking, and taking medication. Since Canada’s universal healthcare system limits his medical options, he has been at the hospital for nine years. 

The London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) staff previously withheld food and water and pushed “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) – another term for euthanasia – on Foley, according to The Federalist. He said the hospital stopped asking him about this for several years.

But since the end of April, Foley told The Dallas Express, staff have started bringing up suicide “almost every night.” He also said since he does not consent to bright lighting during treatment – which he says aggravates his neurological symptoms – the hospital again cut off food, water, medicine, and toileting. At the time of publication, Foley said he was on an IV and growing weak. 

The Dallas Express asked LHSC for comment but did not hear back in time for publication. Foley said he has been surviving on IV fluids for more than two weeks. He said he fears “if this situation continues, I will die.” 

“This has become a matter of survival,” Foley wrote in a recent email to hospital staff, obtained by The Dallas Express. “I am deteriorating.”

Pushing Suicide Questions

In recent weeks, Foley told The Dallas Express, staff have been coming by his room “almost every night” to discuss suicide. 

“[T]he hospital has not stopped and i [sic] am being harassed all the time and staff won’t leave me alone,” Foley wrote in an email. “I tell them not to ask me those questions.”

Foley told The Dallas Express that the staff have asked him suicide questions during routine tasks like bloodwork. He provided recordings of recent interactions with staff to The Dallas Express, eight of which mention suicide. In many of these recordings, nurses enter Foley’s room to ask him about a suicide assessment, and he rebuffs them. 

“I have repeatedly ask [sic] to not ask me any questions about suicide but the hospital ignores me,” he said. “I do not want to die, I want to live.”

Foley said one instance took place on May 4 at 3:45 a.m. He shared a recording of the interaction with The Dallas Express.

“Rog, there’s just a quick question,” a staff member said. 

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“Don’t ask me if it has anything to do with suicide,” Foley replied. “The hospital is not to ask me ever about suicide… Do not ask. Do not ask… How many times do I have to tell the hospital?”

The staff member continued to push the question.

“Wait Rog, just to make sure, you’re refusing …,” the staff member insisted. “I’m just saying, do you refuse?”

“This has to stop… Just don’t ask me,” Foley said. 

In another recording, he asks Doctor Jaspal Dulay why staff are engaging in “harassment about the suicide questions.” Dulay replied that Foley “normally would be high up on concerns around your mental health because of what’s going on with your care. You made it clear you’re feeling at harm.” 

Foley asked Dulay if the staff would “keep on doing the harassment about that.” 

“I deny that we’re harassing you,” Dulay said. “You’re saying it, I’m saying we’re not harassing you.”

The Dallas Express contacted Dulay but did not hear back in time for publication.

Michael Alexander, an attorney who provides legal advice to Foley, told The Dallas Express that Canada’s euthanasia law leaves room for hospital staff to ask questions about suicide. But he said they are bringing it up beyond reason.

“It’s not just one nurse doing this, it’s become a pattern of conduct on the part of hospital personnel,” Alexander said. “They’re clearly in the wrong.”

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told The Dallas Express that Foley goes through “a lot of emotional grief” and has felt suicidal, but hospital workers’ continual questions about suicide could be considered pressure.

“It’s almost like they’re harassing him because it’s one thing to say, ‘We’re concerned about your mental health,’ it’s another thing to have someone tell you, ‘Please stop bringing up suicidality,’” Schadenberg said. “To have them bringing it up anyway – even if there’s some other intention behind it – it seems to me that it’s becoming a bit of a coercion situation where he’s feeling pressured.”

‘You Don’t Want Any Care’

The hospital recently began requiring brighter lighting when interacting with Foley. He said his disability makes him extremely photosensitive, as bright lights cause him “extreme pain, temporary blindness, visual scaring [sic] afterwards of blue and purple markings on my vision, and severe pain,” he wrote in an email.

The hospital had been using a dim, orange lamp when treating Foley for years, but recently issued a lighting assessment — obtained by The Dallas Express – that requires brighter lighting when interacting with him. He said staff usually come in at all hours of the day and night, so this bright lighting is a frequent occurrence. 

Hospital staff reportedly cut off Foley’s food, water, medications, and toileting when they began requiring brighter lighting on May 7, he said to The Dallas Express. He said he is still “cut off,” though one nurse helped with these tasks on May 23 by providing ski goggles and reducing the lighting. Foley said the next night, the staff refused to accommodate.

“So far, that one night of access has been the only one,” Foley wrote in an email. “I’m still on IV fluids and now back to being completely blocked from basic needs. I’m extremely weak, but still trying.”

Foley wrote in an email he “can barely raise mt [sic] head” and fears acidosis – a buildup of acid in the body. He also said he fears for his life. “They are witholding [sic] food and water, and everything. they won;t [sic] help me unless full lights that they know my eyes cannot tolerate,” he wrote in an email. 

According to Foley, the hospital recently made some adjustments, removing several lights and replacing others with dimmer bulbs. However, he expressed concern in an email to administrators that “the hospital shows no urgency and continues to deny me proper accommodation, even if it leads to my death.” He also said that since then, “the hospital added an additional bright halogen.”

“Staff forcibly waking me, turning on harmful lighting without warning, asking suicide questions, and ignoring available alternatives is not safe or respectful — it is negligent,” Foley wrote officials in an email. “I am not refusing care — I am being denied the ability to access it due to an environment made hostile by the S[tandard] O[perating] P[rocedure] you enforce.”

A History Of Pushing Euthanasia 

Canada’s universal healthcare system limits Foley’s medical choices to a home care provider or the hospital. Foley said he first used an in-home care provider, but poor treatment left him suicidal at the time. He was denied the universal healthcare system’s self-directed care program, which would allow him to hire his own home care staff. So nine years ago, he opted for care at LHSC, and has been there ever since.

Foley has struggled with suicidal thoughts, so early on in his time at the hospital, he requested euthanasia – also known as MAID, according to The Federalist. He soon overcame these thoughts and canceled the appointment.

However, hospital staff repeatedly pressured Foley to accept MAID from 2016 to 2018. He provided a recording of one interaction from 2018 with The Dallas Express, in which a staff member suggested ending his life.

“How are you feeling, Rog? Are you feeling like you want to harm yourself or anything like that?” the staff member asks. “If you were, you could just apply to get an assisted – you don’t have to do it in some dramatic manner, you can apply for assisted, you know.”

Foley also told The Dallas Express that Doctor Robert Sibbald, the hospital’s ethicist who suggested harvesting organs from euthanasia patients before they are dead according to The Federalist, pushed euthanasia on him in 2017. At the time, The Federalist published a partial recording of the interaction. The Dallas Express asked Sibbald for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.

LHSC cut off Foley’s access to the medical lift in 2018. According to The Federalist, an opinion from an outside doctor that year concluded the hospital’s “care fell substantially below standard for failing to meet Foley’s nutritional and hydration needs during the period in question.”

The LHSC also allegedly moved Foley into a ward with “intense lighting” in May 2020, according to a complaint he filed with the hospital. “At that time, I was confined to an intravenous drip and forced to cover my face with soft pillowcases to block the harmful light,” Foley wrote in the complaint.

Alexander told The Dallas Express that Canadian doctors have been known to push euthanasia or withdraw treatment early. “There are some public hospitals in Canada that will nudge a vulnerable patient towards death by compromising the basic rudiments of treatment,” he said.

Foley is currently representing himself in a lawsuit against LHSC for its treatment, and Alexander said he is approaching a major deadline to submit case materials. “Let me survive long enough to secure the direct funding home care I need to live and do legal work,” Foley wrote officials in an email. 

Schadenberg told The Dallas Express that Foley is “really in a bad place.” “The hospital may not be intentionally saying it per se, but by making certain decisions, they seem to be saying they want him out of there,” he said.

Schadenberg suggested a simple solution: give Foley “self-directed care.” This would allow him to leave the hospital and hire his own in-home caregivers. 

“He’s been turned down for that, and he’s now in this very bad situation,” Schadenberg said. “He can’t live on his own, and he doesn’t trust the care that he used to receive in the past.”

In Canada, euthanasia is “being normalized in a bigger and bigger way,” as many doctors “simply see it as another form of medical treatment,” according to Schadenberg. “They have totally divorced us from the reality of what it is, just killing somebody,” he said.

He said the second main issue in Canada is the treatment of people with disabilities, whose “needs are massively underfunded.” Schadenberg said disability entitlements have lagged behind post-COVID inflation, so people with disabilities are now “massively underfunded.”

In an email obtained by The Dallas Express, Foley pleaded with hospital officials to consider alternative care approaches. He called the current approach “systemic neglect and discrimination.”

“I am a human being with medically documented disabilities, not a policy problem,” Foley wrote in an email to hospital officials, obtained by The Dallas Express. “Stop this cruelty and work with me to survive.”