A COMPANY DIRECTOR has used social networking site LinkedIn to announce his plans to end his own life at a Swiss euthanasia clinic after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
Simon Binner, 57, received the diagnosis in January and has updated his profile page so that his most recent job entry is as a Motor Neurone disease patient.
In the entry he states:
I died in Switzerland with Eternal Spirit on Mon 19 Oct 2015 and my funeral was on Friday 13 Nov 2015.
He also stated that initially he had expected to live for another two or three years, saying:
My MND accelerated very rapidly. The sawbones initially thought I would last until 2017/2018, but they were mistaken – no worries, it’s an inexact science!
I don’t recommend MND! Better to have one massive fatal stroke or be killed instantly by a drunk driver! There is nothing that I can say that’s positive about MND.
Mr Binner had served as an operations director with Caremark, a health and social care organisation based in the London borough of Sutton, and handed his position over to his colleague Hannah Drury after his diagnosis.
In a statement, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, Andrew Copson, said, “The tragedy at the heart of Simon’s story is that if the law allowed people with incurable and terminal conditions to seek a doctor-assisted death in this country, he and others like him would have more time to spend with their loved ones before their conditions became intolerable for them.”
In a video post on YouTube yesterday in which Mr Binner appears with his wife Debbie, he says that ideally he would like to stay in the UK until Christmas and receive the procedure then, but that uncertainty about his condition means that it is not something he is not able to do.
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