From The Times, September 20, 2009

Pamela Weston explains her assisted suicide

Personal account of her reasons for deciding to die written before her death at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland John Arlidge and Sarah-Kate Templeton

I’m writing this in September 2009. I have decided to go to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland to commit assisted suicide. My story starts in August 1991. I was at a concert in the Albert Hall when a friend kissed me. Afterwards, she said she thought she might be going down with a cold. In fact, it was flu. She got better. I didn’t – perhaps because of my age. I was 70.

I was wretchedly ill for about a fortnight. I had a young doctor at the time who was very inexperienced and didn’t know what to do with me, so I changed to another at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He diagnosed Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (M.E.). He prescribed injections once a month for six months. He said the drugs only suited some people and might not help. They didn’t.

My symptoms have been the same all along and have been getting worse all the time. I have very bad sneezing attacks every few days, which cause sinus problems and sore eyes. My head feels awful and I’m tired all the time. I feel dizzy when I stand. I have also had four heart attacks in the past two years.

I can no longer write professionally any more. There is nothing else I want to do. Nothing else I can do. I am too weak, too tired.

But I have had a happy life. I was born on 17 October 1921 in London and grew up loving music. My mother was an amateur violinist and I played piano. I left school at 16 with two O levels. I was due to study piano and singing at Dresden but war broke out. When I was 20 I heard Frederick Thurston, one of Britain’s greatest clarinetists, play a Mozart concerto on the radio. So inspiring! The finest piece of classical music ever written.

My father had gone back into the army as a doctor and we were in Bovingdon Camp in Dorset. When I found out that the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra were performing with Frederick Thurston, my mother and I dashed down there. I went straight into the Artists’ room to find him. “I love your playing,” I told him. “Can I please learn from you?”

I did a two-year graduate course at the Royal Academy of Music before I managed to get a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music. Thurston wasn’t on the staff but he lived in Barnes, in west London, and he agreed to teach me privately. Once he had to cut short a lesson to go to the Albert Hall to play in the BBC Symphony Orchestra for a Promenade Concert. He bundled me on to an open-top bus and gave me the rest of the lesson in the Artists’ room when we got there.

I loved the Proms. When I was a student I had a season ticket. We were living in Hampstead, north London, at the time. I used to cycle to the Albert Hall, stand through the concert then cycle all the way back. I began performing as a soloist, playing the Festival Hall several times before I finished my scholarship. I used to practice for six hours a day.

Two years after I left Guildhall, the Principal wrote and invited me to go back as a professor. I was a professor there for 17 years. From 1947, I performed as a soloist, playing concertos, broadcasting, especially on the BBC. I even played for the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, in 10 Downing Street. I was very, very lucky.

The 10 years before I got M.E. were probably the most exciting time in my life. I found a new interest in research and writing books and articles about the clarinet. I had also developed my own teaching practice in a studio in my home.

I was traveling all over the world, researching my books, meeting great clarinet players, many of whom are still my friends today. I gave lectures and masterclasses, too. It went to Australasia, America, Italy, Germany, Russia, Iceland, Japan.

In 1984 I directed the only International Clarinet Congress ever held in England. My wonderful friend Richard Mühlfeld, grandson of Brahms’s clarinetist, gave a lecture about the grandfather with whom he shared his name. I was interviewed with him afterwards by the BBC World Service.

But M.E. put a stop to everything. In 1992, one year after I caught the virus, I was in Arizona doing a series of university lectures when my voice just gave out. I just couldn’t get the words out. I moved down to Hythe, in Kent, where I started a new course of drugs. But they did not help. I wrote my last article – for the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain – in January. It was up to my standards but I knew at that moment that I couldn’t go on.

Now, as I prepare to go to Switzerland, I know there is nothing else I want to do. I have started stumbling over my words and I am losing my appetite. I have to push myself to eat.  I don’t have any family but I have some wonderful friends who support what I am doing.

If they could only get somebody to find a cure for M.E. I think a lot of people still see it as a psychological disease. In my case, it’s entirely physical. If I had had depression, I couldn’t have kept writing professionally for 18 years. The trouble is, M.E. is invisible – almost totally invisible – to others.

I’m happy to go to Dignitas, although it has been a terribly stressful process. There are a lot of legal and financial arrangements. Swiss law needs signed and witnessed affidavits to prove who I am and where I live. I need a letter from a doctor to say I am fit to fly. I’ve had four months of stress with all the things they require me to do, because they have to do it in stages. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do what I am doing. But I’m certain that it is right for me.

I go to Zurich by air ambulance. Then I have to stay in a hotel for four days to make sure that I really do want to go ahead. The Dignitas doctor has already said that I am a subject for euthanasia, so there’s no problem there. But Swiss law says the doctor has to see me personally on the first day, then I have to have a day by myself to be quite sure. Then the third day, she comes again and on the fourth day I receive the dose of barbiturates.

I hope assisted suicide will come to England. It could be abused but from my experience so far, it doesn’t seem to be abused in Switzerland.

I’ve had a wonderful, happy life. Now it’s over. What I want now is for campaigners, such as Action for M.E, to use my story to push the Government hard on medical research