Two days before her Christian grandmother’s assisted dying procedure in Ontario, Canada, Brigitte Kranendonk sat her down to make sure she knew exactly what was going to happen.
‘I used very frank terms. I said: “Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?”’
The 83-year-old was in visible disbelief and began crying for 45 minutes. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Brigitte Stegemann, known affectionately to her family as ‘GG’ or ‘Oma’, wailed.
‘She was bawling. Inconsolable,’ Kranendonk, a real estate agent who shares the same first name with her late grandmother, tells the Daily Mail.
In a cognitive test, designed to ascertain whether she was sound of mind enough to consent to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), Stegemann ‘got every question wrong’, believing her two living siblings to be dead, according to Kranendonk.
Yet 48 hours after she wept uncontrollably at the notion of MAiD, Stegemann is said to have died with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood due to a botched first attempt at connecting the IV, administered by a nurse allegedly not wearing gloves.
Kranendonk is currently in the process of desperately appealing to the Chief Coroner’s Office in Ontario, as well as the Patient Ombudsman and Belleville Police, in a bid to ascertain whether what happened the morning of July 10 at The Pearl care home in Cannifton was legal.
Bereaved and distraught, she claims MAiD practitioners took advantage of her grandmother’s vulnerability to perform the procedure, which she alleges was carried out without express consent.
‘She was a vulnerable human being, and they saw an opportunity,’ Kranendonk says, her rage and sadness visible.
She suspects the MAiD practitioners were inappropriately ideologically motivated, and believes the chain of events leading up to the procedure should be investigated.
It is understood that the practitioners and care home, who have not commented publicly, maintain that Stegemann had legally consented to proceed.
‘No one had ever done MAiD at this residential home before: this was their very first MAiD procedure. So I don’t know if they just dropped the ball, because they didn’t know what they were doing.’
The moment of Stegemann’s death was anything but peaceful, as she had once wished.
Recalling those nightmarish minutes, a traumatised Kranendonk speaks in the present tense, as if the procedure was still happening in slow motion.
‘There was a phenomenal amount of blood,’ she says, describing the way that the nurse failed to find the correct vein in the right arm to insert the IV, before switching to the left – but only after having ‘poked her about three or four times with the needle’.
‘It is all over my Oma’s arm, it is all over her nightie, soaking through her pillow, all over the sheets, there is so much blood.
‘And throughout all this time, mind you, the nurse is not wearing gloves.’
Another episode that still haunts Kranendonk is from February: she says she had to convince her grandmother to accept a medical port, a small device placed under the skin to provide a direct way for medicine to reach a vein.
After it was fitted, the 83-year-old repeatedly ripped it off, screaming: ‘I don’t want the death shot!’
Prior to Stegemann’s death that summer, Kranendonk had been her caregiver for 12 years, and her medical power of attorney for the past six.
A year and a half before her death, the family made the decision to house Stegemann in The Pearl as her physical and cognitive health began to deteriorate.
In February, she was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. But doctors were not certain about whether the diagnosis meant she had six months to live, or as much time as two years.
For the past decade, Kranendonk had been carefully monitoring what her grandmother ate to keep her healthy, including limiting her sugar intake.
Following the cancer diagnosis, she changed tack and allowed her to eat whatever she craved, deciding she just wanted her grandmother to feel as ‘joyful’ as possible in her final stage of life.
She spoke to Stegemann about all options, and even brought up MAiD, explaining what the procedure would entail. She remembers her grandmother saying clearly: ‘No, I don’t want that.’
Kranendonk says her religiosity, and the notion of displeasing God, was a large factor in why her German-born grandmother instinctively opposed assisted dying.
Then came June, when Kranendonk and her husband went on a 10-day road trip.
In the past, every time she was away, she received frequent phone calls from the residential home regarding her grandmother’s health.
Everything seemed normal. She picked up numerous phone calls, and the doctors didn’t discuss a dramatic decline in Stegemann’s health – only that she had fallen over and would need a wheelchair.
But towards the end of the trip, on July 3, Kranendonk received a different kind of call. It was from the home, saying they were going to book a MAiD assessment for her grandmother.
Her health had apparently seriously deteriorated.
The news hit like a ton of bricks.
Back in Cannifton, Kranendonk anxiously questioned a nurse at the residential home about who had initiated the MAiD conversation.
‘The nurse became very abrasive, very defensive,’ Kranendonk recalls. ‘She was like, “Well, I’m just trying to advocate for her. I’m just trying to do what’s right for her.”‘
Soon after Kranendonk returned from her trip away, she discovered her grandmother had actually already had her first MAiD consultation.
‘No one called me,’ she says, explaining how she feels she was isolated from the whole process from the beginning.
While her grandmother was certainly sick, Kranendonk found it difficult to believe that she had rapidly declined in health during her trip away, and privately questioned whether what the nurses told her was true.
‘I noticed that she had lost weight when I saw her after returning, but she had slowly been losing weight for a while.
‘Regarding her rapid decline, I am not a doctor, but when I came back she was still eating, walking to the bathroom, very talkative and full of jokes.
‘She never complained about pain in front of me, except when her stomach was being relentlessly pressed.’
Kranendonk maintains that Stegemann did not at any point make a formal MAiD application herself.
But every time she tried to question whether MAiD was the right pathway for her grandmother, she feels she was made to feel crazy or burdensome by the medical professionals at the home.
‘I truly believe that one nurse really saw us as an obstacle,’ she says. ‘We were getting in the way of her doing MAiD on my grandmother. I think she really, truly believes that MAiD is the best for people, and shame on me for trying to stop that.’
Kranendonk made sure she was in the room for the second MAiD assessment, and it was there where she noticed the doctor speak in ‘really loose terms, never using the words death or dying’.
‘She explains MAiD to my grandmother by saying: “We’re going to give you medicine, you’re going to feel at peace. And I just want you to know that you won’t have a bowel movement.”’
‘She’s saying it in these strange terms, that aren’t literal,’ Kranendonk says, adding: ‘My Oma’s just kind of nodding. Her first language is not English, she is 83-years old and severely hearing-impaired.’
Kranendonk looked at the doctor, and said: ‘She doesn’t understand what you’re saying.’
That’s when the doctor allegedly turned to the grandmother, and offered: ‘We’re going to make sure you won’t have any more pain.’
