| The
story of Max Bell told by Dr Philip Nitschke.
Max Bell drove his Holden Commodore
taxi to Darwin in June 1996 to use the Rights
of the Terminally Ill Act to die. Sixty-seven
years old and suffering from stomach cancer, Max’s
surgery had left him with constant nausea and
vomiting.
Max was a mere shadow of his former
self. Earlier in life he had been a professional
golfer, a boxer and later a body guard around
the darker streets of Sydney. He had decided to
spend his twilight years in Broken Hill.
On arrival into Darwin it was clear
that Max paid a price for his six day drive. Desperately
ill, I had him admitted to Royal Darwin Hospital,
and there he languished for the next three weeks.
In that period, I tried desperately to get 3 doctors
to sign his paperwork to
make him eligible to use the ROTI law. None of them
would break ranks with the AMA which was running an effective but unnecessary scare-mongering campaign. I rang every specialist
in the Northern Territory. Marshall Perron even
came to see Max in hospital. While the NT had the
world’s first law, it wasn’t working.
At the end of three weeks, Max signed
himself out of hospital and drove back to Broken
Hill. He was disgusted and angry at what he saw
as the cowardice of the doctors. He was furious
with me for not warning him that this could happen.
His accusation, “you didn’t do your
homework, boy” was made and then he was
gone.
A week later I joined Max in Broken
Hill where I found him camped in his not yet sold
house. With a few of his friends we bought him
a bed and bits of crockery and I stayed with him
in the house for the remaining three weeks of
his life. As his health failed, he was finally
moved to the palliative care bed at the Broken
Hill Base Hospital. There, heavily sedated with
morphine, Max died over a period of three days.
He died precisely in the way he most dreaded,
slowly and with the process out of his control.
In the final months of Max Bell’s
life, the ABC TV program 4 Corners came to Darwin
and made a program called “Road to Nowhere”
about Max’s trip and his failed quest to
use the ROTI law. Channel 7’s Witness program
followed, coming to Broken Hill and tracing the
last few days of his life.
Max was an important patient. While
he never benefited from the law, the images contained
in the TV coverage of Max’s dying convinced
the first specialist surgeon in Darwin to break
ranks. Today, Max’s cab lives on as my car
and, like his memory, travels with me around Australia.
Max was recently the subject of a play called The Last Cab
to Darwin - which won the Patrick White playright
award in 2002. Unfortunately, the play has little association to the real Max Bell and certainly no association with myself since playwright Reg Cribb seems to have spoken to no one who knew Max well at all. In my opinion Cribb has denigrated the memory of Max and defamed me - in the name of "art."
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