This doctor helped the dying end their lives with dignity. Then he was diagnosed with cancer.

How Dr. Peter Rasmussen made his final choice

A doctor gets the send-off he deserves.
(Image credit: Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Corbis)

Peter Rasmussen was always able to identify with his patients, particularly in their final moments. But he saw himself especially in a small, businesslike woman with leukemia who came to him in the spring of 2007, not long before he retired. Alice was in her late 50s and lived outside Salem, Oregon, where Rasmussen practiced medical oncology. Like him, she was stubborn and practical and independent. She was not the sort of patient who denied what was happening to her or who scrambled after any possibility of a cure. As Rasmussen saw it, "she had long ago thought about what was important and valuable to her, and she applied that to the fact that she now had acute leukemia."

From the start, Alice refused chemotherapy, a treatment that would have meant several long hospitalizations with certain suffering, a good chance of death, and a small likelihood of truly helping. As her illness progressed, she also refused hospice care. She wanted to die at home.

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