14 DAY TRIAL // The two best friends, Nancy Vermeulen and Pegie Liekens, both in their 40s, have decided they don't want to go on with their lives and requested assisted suicide.
The women were inspired by the euthanasia debates in Belgium, and even if they aren't suffering from any life threatening disease, they both believe taking their lives is the best thing to do at the moment.
Nancy and Pegie are both suffering from health issues, not life threatening, but harsh enough to make their existence difficult sometimes. Pegie is suffering from serious complications after an anti-obesity surgery that left her unable to consume anything else than liquids, and Nancy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis back in 2011, according to DailyMail.
Pegie Liekens, mother of one, chose assisted suicide even if that means she will leave her 17-year-old child without a mom. Her condition requires her to do regular blood transfusion to treat her anemia and to endure excruciating pain from a herniate disc she developed later on.
Even if doctors recommended her to wait at least a few years to see if maybe her condition gets better, the suffering woman says she is not willing to endure that kind of lifestyle anymore.
Nancy Vermeulen was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a condition that only gets worse in time. The exhaustion and pain is already barely endurable and the woman does not want to stick around when it will get even worse. The same as in Pegie's case, doctors told her that she is too young to think of assisted suicide.
The two best friends thought of this solution after hearing the case of the Belgian doctor and activist Wim Distelmans who was promoting the “Right-to-die.” Wim promoted the “death on demand concept” and started a worldwide controversy after ending the life of a botched sex-change operation victim Nathan Verhelst. The man, who was born a woman, died after being administrated a lethal injection in the assisted suicide program.
The two Belgian women see assisted suicide as “the light at the end of the tunnel” and are committed to ending their lives. They already started downloading and filing out the forms requested for the procedure and made contact with an organization that can help them take their lives.
People consider the two women crazy, but that doesn't change their minds. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium as long as the suffering patient has a futile medical condition that makes him/her endure unbearable suffering, both physical or mental.