This article was published by Kelsi Sheren on her Substack on September 20, 2026.
By Kelsi SherenEXCLUSIVE interview given to The Kelsi Sheren Perspective by Lori Bauman.
Twelve Days and Shawn was Dead. A man fell in his living room on Vancouver Island. Twelve days later he was dead by MAID. His family still can’t get his medical records.
On May 9, 2025, Shawn Bauman fell at home on Vancouver Island. He was 55 years old. On May 21, 2025, he was euthanized.
Twelve days.
He was not terminally ill. He had already survived cancer, he had already survived heart surgery. His ex-wife — the mother of his two daughters — says there was nothing to indicate the end was near. He was a heavy drinker and he was not in the best of health. That is a different thing than dying.
This is her account. She wrote it out herself, and she has given it to me. I am reporting what the family says happened and what the record shows. Where I could not confirm something, I say so.
What the family says happened below:
Shawn hurt his ribs in the fall. Paramedics came. He was admitted to emergency, X-rayed, and told it was bruising — no fractures, no dislocations. He was discharged.
He went back the same day. Trembling. Sweating. Pain at the base of his neck radiating across his shoulders. A CT scan of the cervical spine found a compression fracture at T3. No spinal cord compression. No neurological compromise. A neurosurgeon was consulted and determined surgery was not required.
He was sent home with acetaminophen, ibuprofen, ketorolac, hydromorphone, diazepam, cyclobenzaprine and furosemide.
The next day, May 10, his legs gave out. He was adjusting himself on the couch when he lost all movement and all sensation in both legs, completely and at once. He lay there for two hours, unable to move, waiting for his roommate to come home and call an ambulance.
When Shawn had new scans done, they found what the first ones had not: a large epidural hematoma — a collection of blood around the spinal cord — running from T4 to T11.
An emergency physician on the Island got Vancouver General Hospital’s spine service on the phone and told them this man needed specialized spinal surgery. Vancouver General accepted him for emergency transfer to relieve the spinal compression.
Then he crossed the water, and the family says the lights went out. They were never given a report. During his entire stay they never spoke to a single member of his medical team. What they know, they know from two of his friends. When his daughter reached him directly, he told her he was too drugged up to talk.
The emergency surgery he was transferred to was going to take place at Vancouver General, as far as the family knows, never performed. Nobody has told them why.
One of his friends told them MAID had come up. His ex-wife told her daughter not to worry about it. She had read the law. He wasn’t terminal, and there was a process, and a ninety-day assessment.
On the evening of May 20, his daughter got a call from her father. It was scheduled for the next morning. That quick and that simple. A friend set up a conference call the following morning, shortly before it happened. He was personable, he kept it light and he was proud of himself for agreeing to donate his eyes, and for agreeing to have his brain hooked up and monitored while the procedure was carried out. He called it his last little contribution to society.
Let me be clear about which half of that matters. Organ donation after euthanasia is settled practice in this country. Canadian Blood Services wrote the policy in 2019 and hundreds of Canadians have done it.
Shawn giving his eyes is not the part that should stop you. The brain is. Recording a man’s brain while he is being killed is not donation — donation happens after death, and this happened during. A living man, wired to a machine, producing data while the injection went into his arm. That is research on a human subject, and research on human subjects in Canada requires a written protocol, a research ethics board, an approval number, and the informed consent of someone competent to give it. So a file exists. It has to.
Somewhere in Vancouver there is a protocol with a number on it and a consent form with a signature on it, dated inside the eleven days between the afternoon this man lost the use of his legs and the morning he died — signed by a man who told his own daughter he was too drugged up to hold a conversation. I have asked for it.
His family were in shock. His ex-wife says she wanted to shout *don’t do it.* She didn’t. What do you say to someone who is about to have his life taken from him?
They were offered the chance to stay on the phone while it happened. They said no. She did not want that to be the last memory her daughters had of their father.
This is where the family’s account stops being a private grief and becomes a public question.
Canada runs two tracks.
**Track 2** is for people whose natural death is *not* reasonably foreseeable. It requires a minimum of ninety clear days between the start of the first assessment and the lethal injection. It requires a second assessor with expertise in the condition causing the suffering. It requires that the person be informed about — and give serious consideration to — counselling, mental health supports, disability supports, community services and palliative care.
Ninety days. That is what his ex-wife had read. That is why she told her daughter it wasn’t going to happen.
**Track 1** is for people whose natural death *is* reasonably foreseeable. There is no minimum waiting period. Parliament deleted the ten-day reflection period in March 2021. Track 1 also permits a written waiver of final consent, which allows a practitioner to proceed without the person confirming, at the moment of death, that they still want to die.
Twelve days from a fall in the living room to a lethal injection is not possible on Track 2 — unless the ninety days was shortened, which the law permits only when the person is about to lose the capacity to make health care decisions and both assessments are already complete.
So one of two things happened. Either Shawn was assessed as Track 1, or he was assessed as Track 2 and the clock was cut short because someone determined he was about to lose capacity.
Both roads run through the same finding: that this man’s natural death was reasonably foreseeable. Eleven days after Vancouver General Hospital accepted him for emergency surgery to relieve the compression on his spine.
I want to be careful here. It is possible for a clinician to reach that finding lawfully. A man with a serious spinal cord injury, a history of cancer and heart surgery, and heavy alcohol use is not a man in perfect health, and I am not a physician. But somebody made that call, and somebody signed it, and the family has never been shown a single page of it. This is what they do, they have a pattern of not alerting the families before this happens.
That is not a medical question, that is simply a records question.
His daughter made a formal request for her father’s medical records. Vancouver General’s response, as the family provided it to me, acknowledged that she may be considered an appropriate person to act on behalf of the deceased — and then refused her, on the grounds that her access was sought for her own personal reasons rather than on behalf of the deceased.
“You are the right person to ask. You are asking for the wrong reason.”
The reason was that her father died and she wants to know how. A coroner opened an investigation. Fifteen months later the family has still not received a report.
Here is the part that most people won’t catch. Since November 2018, a MAiD death in British Columbia is only reportable to the BC Coroners Service in narrow circumstances — including where the underlying condition that led to the request relates to an accident, violence, or self-inflicted injury. Shawn’s condition started with a fall.
Which means the province’s own reporting rules classified the chain of events that ended his life as beginning with an accident. Not a terminal disease. An accident. In his living room. Twelve days earlier. The care he received on the Island is separately being reported through Island Health’s Patient Care Quality Office.
The questions I have put these to Island Health, Vancouver Coastal Health, and the BC Coroners Service. Lori has also reported this to the Ombudsman. A deadline for comment was given and no response was issued on the following.
1. Was the emergency spinal surgery Shawn was transferred to Vancouver General to receive ever performed? If not, why not, and who decided?
2. Was he assessed under Track 1 or Track 2?
3. If Track 1, on what basis was his natural death determined to be reasonably foreseeable, eleven days after he was accepted for emergency surgical intervention?
4. If Track 2, was the ninety-day period shortened on the basis of imminent loss of capacity — and if so, how was capacity to consent to death assessed in a man who told his own daughter he was too drugged up to talk?
5. Was a waiver of final consent signed?
6. Who raised MAiD first — Shawn, or a member of staff?
7. Under what research protocol, with what ethics approval and what consent documentation, was his brain monitored during the provision?
8. Why has an adult daughter, acknowledged in writing as an appropriate person, been refused her father’s records?
I’m not telling you Shawn was murdered. I don’t know that, and neither does his family, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.
I’m telling you a man fell down in his living room and was dead of a needle inside two weeks, that the surgery meant to save him appears never to have happened, that nobody will explain why, and that his daughters have been locked out of the paperwork by the same institutions that hold every answer.
A system that was doing nothing wrong would hand over the file.
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