It's a good question, and nobody has the exact answer.
The study that we did and the one that my Saskatchewan colleagues published this year are very similar studies. The questions by my Saskatchewan colleagues to the people living with disability.... As we've heard today, the experts are the people living with the disability. Those people we interviewed are the experts. I'm not the expert.
For the Saskatchewan colleagues, it was the same thing. They interviewed people with spinal cord injury and with chronic spinal cord injury. We got a variety of answers, with anywhere from a year to five years. One in the Saskatchewan group even said 10.
We know that it can be years. We don't have a definition of exactly how long it will be. The study I talked to you about, on stroke and other neurologic disabilities, found it's two years. We know that suicidality rates in spinal cord injury decrease quite dramatically by seven years.
Hearing the experts—who are the people we interviewed and the people the Saskatchewan people interviewed, and who were the people living with and who had gone through this—they all consistently said that offering MAID before people have had that chance to reintegrate into the community.... They can't make an informed decision until they've had that opportunity.
One lady I work with has a high spinal cord injury. She is amazing. She's a Ph.D. She has three children. She runs the university department she works at. She's a paralympic athlete. She said it took five years before she woke up and realized she was happy that she was alive, and she thinks her quality of life is excellent.
How do you define that? I don't know, but according to the people interviewed, it was anywhere from a year to up to 10 years.