"Last Wish" is the true story of the author, Betty Rollin's mother, a health concerned and loving woman in her mid seventies. Betty tells the story of her mothers experience after being diagnosed with ovarian cander and her own experience being related to someone with cancer. This book shoes the hardships of cancer, chemotherepy, and assisted suicide on both the cancer patients and their friends and familys. Betty Rollin does a wonderfull job telling her story with great emotion and truth. I recommend this to anyone suffering with cancer, being close to someone with cancer, interested in or researching cancer.

"Last Wish" is the true story of the author, Betty Rollin's mother, a health concerned and loving woman in her mid seventies. Betty tells the story of her mothers experience with ovarian cancer and her own experience having a mother who is dying. This book shows the hardships of cancer, chemotherepy, and assisted suicide on both the cancer patients and their family and friends. Betty Rollin does a wonderfull job telling her story with great emotion and truth. I recommend this book to anyone close to someone who is a cancer patient, cancer patients, and anyone interested in or researching cancer.

Breast cancer survivor and journalist Betty Rollin, who wrote the classic First ,You Cry, has written another classic here, the story of her mother's failing battle with ovarian cancer and the suicide that Rollin and her husband, Ed, helped her mother, at her mother's insistence, to implement. I don't greatly approve of the suicide alternative nor of stories that, by making it sound so feasible, give encouragement in this direction. Not that I think God does such a great job of carrying people off; who would need suicide if that were the case? The problem is rather that the delicate boundary between personal choice and a choice brought on by social pressure gets breached as soon as a cultural movement toward the suicide option starts taking shape in the public mind. Indeed Rollin's book, whether she likes it or not, adds one more little increment to the assisted suicide ambience, an ambience that every family facing a situation becomes aware of. This being said, Rollin's mother's choice was so clearly her own and Rollin's book is so elegantly and perfectly written, without melodramatics and with just the right leavening of humor, that my impulse is to show it to everyone who might have the faintest reason to be interested! Rollin has an impeccable eye for the emotional, the medical and the legal complexities of the situation. In one episode, while she and her mother work out the plan, a chance remark sets off Rollin's tears: "Please, sweetheart, don't be upset," my mother said. "I'm doing what I want to do. I don't feel the least bit sorry for myself. I'm lucky I can get out of this. The people I feel sorry for are all the people who want to and can't. Please, sweetheart." I wiped my face with the back of my hand. "I know what you're saying, Mother, and I agree with you. But you can't expect me not to be upset. I think it's right what you're doing, but - but I love you. How can I not be upset?" She listened quietly when I said that. With some unsteadiness, I got up and blew my nose and came back and sat down. Then we resumed our plotting.

In another we find the plotter's coming up against the impasse of mother's failing digestive system: "What did you find out?" she asked. "Maybe these," I said, picking up the Dalmane. "How many?" "Probably around fifteen...or more." ...She looked at the bottle again and frowned. "How will I be able to take fifteen pills?" "That's the problem," I said, "But we're gathering other ideas." "What other ideas?" Oh God, I thought, please stop. She sighed and turned her head to the wall. "Maybe you could take me to the roof of this building. I hear it's nice up there." I looked down at my hands. It was getting hard to tell when something was a joke. "Your digestion could improve, Mother. That could happen." She nodded. "So I can't die until I feel better."

Staying on the safe side, legally, meant making mother's suicide seem unassisted, and this involves Betty and Ed in detailed mental shuffling. Who will discharge the night nurse? Will the next day nurse be able to handle finding her patient dead and will she wonder why no night nurse met her at the door? How to keep a certain relative from calling that night? Who can be found to check in the night and make sure mother has not re-awakened in distress? Etc. Rollin learns, as she puts it, "A new respect for the intelligence of criminals." This book could, in all fairness be used to help families decide against assisted suicide as well as for it. In the end, Rollin's mother recovered sufficient digestive powers to keep her death potient down, and it was her continued mental lucidity and canny social skills - it was she who got the doctor to prescribe, it was she who rescheduled the nurses and fobbed off innocent relatives - that were the key to bringing it off. She ate a bite of food 6 hours before the appointed time; took a Compazine 1 hour before; then at the appointed time, 20 tiny 100 mg tabs of Nembutal, chased by 5 Dalmane. All washed down with soda water. There you go, folks.

Don't waste your time or money! No doubt, when this book was first written it was a ground breaker. Unfortunately, there isn't any real help to be found in the text. Today, there is much more valuable information available. At a time when your physical and emotional energy hits some real lows, spend your time reading something that can really help. I would highly recommend "Just Get Me Through This" by Deborah Cohen and Robert Gelfand, M.D.

When I was a teenager I remember reading Betty Rollin's book for the first time. It had an enormous impact on me because it was really the first time anyone had ever spoken about their experience with breast cancer. Little did I know that when I was 50 years old I would also develop breast cancer. I thought about this book and tried to find it but it was out of print. I was so glad to see it back with new information. The feelings she describes are still true today but what a difference the new treatments have made.