Thank you for the question.
We receive calls weekly, and we get them not just from people with intellectual disabilities and their families. Because we have been vocal on the issue, we also get them from people with all different types of disabilities.
They fall into two categories: people with disabilities who reach out to us in a last ditch attempt to find someone to help them, because they have tried so hard for so long to get the help they need; and people with disabilities who have accessed our health care system for regular, ordinary, everyday things and been offered MAID along the way for everything, as I mentioned, from a bruised hip because of a fall out of a taxicab to treatment for pneumonia. One thing they have in common is that none of them wanted to die.
We have had people call us such as a person with a disability who was a victim of intimate partner violence and had no access to income to get out of that situation because she was on disability income support who felt like if she couldn't get out of that situation, it would be better to be dead, or she may be killed. We had a person with muscular dystrophy who was living with a parent who died of cancer and had been providing a significant amount of support. Once that support was gone, they could not get the support they needed to live in their own home and were going to be institutionalized. We've had people on waiting lists for three years for chronic pain management specialists.
The list goes on and on. We have a binder of examples.