Ellen Vanstone had one last story to tell. The witty freelance writer for newspapers, magazines and TV — and one-time Star etiquette columnist — learned in 2022 she had cancer, and soon she was in stage four, with tumours in her brain and elsewhere. Her fight with the disease (she died last year) put her through arduous treatment regimens involving radiation and drugs, but as she recounts in her book “Is This a Funny Story?” there was one medication she was actually looking forward to: psilocybin.
I’m counting on what I’ve been told by my palliative doctors — that the end tends to come after a quickish physical decline, at which point people usually sleep a lot and are relatively comfortable because there’s plenty of symptom relief on offer. This has been true throughout my illness. All my various doctors have prescribed as much hydromorphone as I want. Early on, when I asked one doctor if there was “any danger of long-term addiction” vis-à-vis all the opiates I was taking, she hesitated, then answered carefully, “Uh, I don’t think that’s anything you have to worry about.”
