TV newsreader Tracey Spicer has told how she considered suffocating her mother with a pillow to end her suffering from cancer.
In an opinion piece written for News Limited on Monday, Spicer says her mother Marcia Spicer's lungs and pancreas were riddled with cancer, leaving her howling incoherently and writhing in agony.
For her helpless family the need to end her suffering became paramount.
"Dad, my sister Suzanne and I pleaded with the oncologist to increase Mum's morphine to release her from this living hell," Spicer wrote.
"It soon became an obsession. Palliative care nurses were tackled in the corridor and asked whether they would assist in a murder."
On the final night of her mother's life in October 1999, when it became clear not even the strongest drugs could dull her pain, Spicer decided to act.
"I walked next to the bed and held the pillow above her face, thinking: 'Can I do this?'," she said.
"That was when I looked into her face and thought: 'I just can't do it."
Her mother's death, a few hours later, was the result of natural causes.
Although Spicer is in favour of voluntary euthanasia in cases where a patient is able to give consent, she has no regrets about not going through with it in her mother's case.
"The problem was, Mum was on so many drugs she wasn't lucid for most of her illness," she said.
"So although we knew that, deep down, she wouldn't want to exist like that, she had never articulated it.
"And I didn't think it was my right to take her life when other family members might have benefited from seeing her for another day or another week, even though she was suffering."
