Case reference: MAID-BC-2020-AJAW · Vancouver, British Columbia · Approved for MAID; outcome not publicly known · Recorded by the register as a MAID victim
Who she is
Marcia Doherty has lived with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also called chronic fatigue syndrome, for about 45 years. It began after an Epstein-Barr infection when she was young. For years the media knew her only as “Madeline,” the pseudonym The Tyee used to protect her privacy. In December 2024 she went public under her own name in a bid to survive and push for change.
Before her health deteriorated, Marcia spent some 30 years volunteering and building community, which she has documented in videos and a three-page record of her work. She still advocates for people with ME, long COVID and disabilities, through her podcast I Am Madeline, a petition, and writing for UK outlet The Canary. When she is well enough, she loves time with friends and being outdoors. She once dreamed of spending money on education rather than on staying alive.
What happened
Marcia qualified for MAID in 2021. She has found treatments that ease her symptoms, but BC’s Medical Services Plan does not cover them, and she says ME does not even have an MSP billing category. The Tyee reported that her disability supplements paid $23 per session for up to 10 sessions a year, while the treatments cost $200 to $300 a session and she needed them about three times a week. Her disability payment, then $1,358 a month, went on rent in social housing and food for her special diet.
Photo: Marcia Doherty (her own GoFundMe) (source)
Photo: Supplied, via The Tyee (source)
She has gone about $45,000 into medical debt and has lived for years on crowdfunding. Each time The Tyee spoke with her, at least five times between July 2021 and November 2022, she was unsure she had money to last more than a few weeks. In 2024 she launched a new GoFundMe and a petition calling for better supports for people with ME and everyone on BC’s Persons with Disability assistance, and said she was starting a BC Human Rights Tribunal case. In August 2026 she wrote that she had been medically advised to rest, and that her GoFundMe money would last until the first week of November 2026.
Why they were pushed toward MAID
In her own words, poverty and the lack of covered care are pushing her toward MAID. “You’re dying of poverty. If I had money I would be OK,” she told The Tyee. “But because I don’t, I have unnecessarily deteriorated and it will cost more to pull me back. And it never needed to be like this.”
The Canary reports that she applied for MAID because she feels she has no other choice, not because she wants to die. If she had adequate health care and support, she would not need MAID. She has said that if she stops her minimal supports, “catastrophic failure” will follow, and she has written that being approved for MAID helped her step away from “the terror of the brutal kind of death I face when I run out of money.” Helaine Boyd of Disability Alliance BC called her situation “extremely urgent and dire.”
In their own words
Marcia put it most starkly herself: “MAID is just, ‘Do I jump or do I burn?’”
“I would like to stay alive and not do the petitions and GoFundMe, and spend that money on education,” she told The Tyee. “It’s really hard to stay alive with a GoFundMe. People like me cannot have to live like this forever.”
Writing in The Canary in December 2025, she said: “Begging for my life on the internet, staying alive month to month on donations from strangers… these rob hope of its strength. And when you’re approved for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) on quality of life, despair is an easy thing to teeter into.” On her GoFundMe she wrote: “It always costs the system catastrophically more to allow a disabled person to deteriorate.”
What this case shows
Marcia Doherty wants to live, and she has said so publicly for six years. What stands between her and a bearable life is the price of care, not a lack of options. Her case shows how legislated poverty turns MAID into a fallback for disabled Canadians, and how a GoFundMe can end up being the only thing between a person and death.
Sources
- GoFundMe (Marcia Doherty, her own page): Marcia aka Madeline-Petition FIGHTING TO LIVE
- The Canary: A woman from Canada with severe ME has been approved for MAiD – but she wants to live
- The Canary: Assisted dying warning from Canadian severe ME patient
- The Tyee: Chronically Ill, but ‘Dying of Poverty’
- CityNews Vancouver: Vancouver woman with disabilities seeking medically assisted dying
- The Canary (Marcia Doherty): Marcia: life with severe ME is like screaming into the void
- I Am Madeline (her podcast): Medical instruction: REST
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