After 29-year-old Brittany Maynard found out that she had less than six months to live, she began researching treatment options to gauge what the rest of her life might look like. She did not like what she saw.

Diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, Maynard found herself facing treatments that would inflict pain. As her tumor grew, it would also inflict more pain than the severe headaches she had already been experiencing. Because she is so young and otherwise healthy, she could expect to linger far past when the last of her quality of life had fled.

Radiation to stop the treatment would have burned off her hair and left first degree burns all over her entire scalp. While her body hung on, the tumor would have stolen her cognitive abilities as well as her verbal and motor skills.

So instead of spending the last of her time in hospice care, painfully fading while her family watched, Maynard decided to go with a different option. She chose to move to Oregon, where she could opt to die on her own terms.

Oregon is one of five states in the U.S. that has adopted a law known as the Death With Dignity Act. Once Maynard was able to establish residency — which required moving from California, changing her driver’s license, finding a home, changing physicians, etc. — her diagnosis qualified her to receive a prescription for her to use to end her own life.

According to a study done in 2013, 75 percent of people who are given these types of prescriptions have terminal cancer. This is largely because of the criteria to qualify, which states that a person must have less than six months to live and be of sound mind.

Not everyone who is given the prescription takes it, either, the study found. In 2012, only 67 of 115 patients given the life ending medications actually took them.

Maynard says she has the prescription but has yet to take it. She stresses that she is not suicidal. Rather, she simply does not want to die in a way that is torture to her and her family. When she decides it is time, she wants to gather her loved ones to her side and pass away peacefully, in her own home.

“I can’t imagine trying to rob anyone else of that choice,” she said.