Swiss Women Find Assisted Suicide Effective Against Male Snoring

WINTERTHUR, Switzerland.  Selina Bless used to arrive at her job as a pastry chef every morning at 6:30 a.m., tired and haggard-looking.  “Once I am up, I am up,” she says with resignation, “and my husband Lukas, he snored so loud, I couldn’t sleep through the night!”

But that was before she spoke to her friend Nina Blauch, who told her of a treatment that sounded worse than the ailment it was designed to cure, but which has been a godsend to the 39-year-old, who has two children in gymnasium, the equivalent of American high school.  “Now I sleep soundly and wake up refreshed,” she says with a sigh of relief.  “The kids say I am not so crabby anymore.”

The Bless family had tried everything to reduce Lukas’s snoring, from nose strips, to a mouth guard, to a chin strap, but none was as effective as Selbstmord Assistiert, or assisted suicide.  “The mouth guard was always falling out, and the nose strips were useless,” Selina says as she rolls her eyes thinking about the years of sleep she lost.  “The chin strap was so goofy looking I couldn’t fall asleep for laughing.”

Switzerland was the first nation to adopt an assisted suicide law, and experts say it has helped the mountainous central European country keep its health costs under control.  “We were spending too much on heroic measures to extend life for the elderly maybe six months at most,” says Dr. Elias Zercher, a professor of public health at Thurgau State University.  “You don’t buy a new suit for your 86-year-old grandfather, do you?”


“C’mon, give it a try.  If it doesn’t work out, I’ll ask for a refund.”

 

Religious groups have criticized assisted suicide laws as a slippery slope to euthanasia, but Selina Bless says the after-Christmas mark-downs at Winterthur’s “Little House of Death” were too good to pass up.  When this reporter asks whether she obtained her husband’s informed consent she nods her head enthusiastically.  “He always loved a bargain,” she says, “I know he would have approved.”

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