Frank was the first of the people I wished for to show up.

He taught me ethics in 2016 and was a bit strange.

(But just to be clear to Frank, all these interactions happened Infront of the class, so it is not just my word against his if he wants to oppose this.)

I always used to flip an American silver dollar back in 2016. So, I was flipping it in class when suddenly this man, the teacher, snatched it out of my hand and examined it eagerly only to look disappointed.

He went one to describe a coin, and say that if someone stole a coin like the one he described then they could tell the person they stole it from anything.

The man who gave me this coin told me a different rule. The two rules are not mutually exclusive but there is something like a contradiction of will occurring when stealing leads to truth. The man who gave me the coin only gave me the coin out of the dozen or so scouts who got the award

He took me a side and said this to me:

“Give this to a true friend, and they can tell you anything”

I don’t know if I have found a true friend since they have a tendency to stab me in the back or disappear after hearing the truth.

But this story is just a example. He knew more than he was saying, but what happened which led to the four Fs and 1 NC in 2016 on my record was something nobody saw coming.

But before I go into all that, I should probably talk about what I was thinking about in Nursing 133 with Paula Littlejohn and Nursing 111 with Hazel Penn. I took these classes in 2014. In Paula’s class, Nurs 133, I was thinking about DEATH. The class delt with the topic and the debates about medically assisted dying in the Canadian Parliament were raging. I wanted to understand under what conditions should someone be allowed to die of their own volition.

In Nursing 111, I was more focused on geopolitical events. It was off topic but the protests in Ukraine were starting to turn into war, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was starting to emerge.

It was against this backdrop that in the cafeteria at Camosun College, I wished for an expert on miracles to show up. Two years later despite not wishing aloud, a soon to be doctor named Frank Jankunis showed up.

He just had finished writing this paper.

He also did his Masters Degree on Miracles

In his work on miracles, Frank uses a thought experiment involving two people. The names Frank Jankunis used caught my eye. I did realize this at the time. But Lily had a brother. The names are not the same. Lettie and Mac are the names of the children in Franks 2014 paper. The Lily I knew had a brother named Max.

What the Fuck Frank…

But this is not why I dropped out. The reason I dropped out was that Frank used an, or misused, an idea I had in 2014. Well he gave away my example without asking which resulted in it being missuses, in my opinion.

The idea had first come into my head about a year before in when I was doing Nursing 133 and Nursing 111. But I had never wrote it down despite having been tweaking the idea for about a year or so. During the first midterm in Frank’s class, I got to the essay question and saw the perfect place to write it down.

The example was a simple no brainer I thought. But apparently it was good enough to be taken and fuck my life and everything up.

This is roughly the example:

Suppose that you are a nurse working on a ward, and you have a patient with an illness that causes and egregious amount of suffering, and assume that there is no cure and will be fatal in a short time if left untreated. Now, assume that the doctor has prescribed a pill that will neither cure the disease nor alleviate the patients suffering, but it will extend the patients life considerably. Further, the patient has told you explicitly and repeatedly that they do not want to take the pill, and they want to succumb to their illness. Should the nurse give the pill that the doctor has prescribed?

I would say no because of several reasons.

1. The nurse would be harming the patient treating them
2. The nurse would be violating the rights of the patient to security of person and bodily autonomy
3. The nurse would be making a choice for the patient that the patient is some cases only truly makes if they have the capacities to see it though and carry it out on their own.

But what was missed in the M.A.I.D debate was that suicide is a personal choice. Some choices are not made until they have been carried out. People of able body should not be aided if they are able to do it themselves. This was a factor I considered in my example. This was why the patient was bed ridden in a hospital. If you can do something yourself, you should do it yourself. There are countless examples of this line of reasoning in literature and reality. Just because someone chooses to cross the street does not mean that a doctor should be obligated to carry the person across the street. Killing one’s self is scary; fear of death is given to us by God himself and to give back His gift is something the person who’s life will be lost should, if in any way possible, be the one who gives it back.

I do not think nor have I seen doctors to have any special ability in moral reasoning. Studying biology and pharmacology does not make someone any better than anyone else at knowing what one ought to do. Having a piece of paper with doctor on it does not make someone truly a teacher. It should not be medically assisted dying but rather judicially approved suicide.