I know of at least one case in which a conscious person not in a PVS died of what was essentially starvation and dehydration. The man was in his later 70s and had a tumor in his esophagus that made it impossible for him to swallow anything, including food, water and his own saliva. Because he was conscious and not brain damaged or in a PVS, he was also capable of refusing to be kept alive by any ‘heroic measures’ such as a feeding tube. Until the morning of his death, he remained conscious and able to communicate, and through it all he denied that he was in any kind of pain and refused any kind of pain medication because he said he was not in pain. Now, I had to take his word for it, but I hardly think that there’d be any reason for a man who was terminally ill to lie about being in pain.
And yet it is exactly how this man, with esophageal cancer, chose to die.
You would perhaps be interested in this quote:
He was referring to the book Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying by Derek Humphry, which I read years ago when it was first released for a research paper that I did on assisted suicide due to my experiences with the man I wrote about above. While I can’t say whether active euthanasia would be proper for Terri Schiavo, I can say that there ought to be such an option for those who are conscious, or for those who have made living wills and/or durable power of attorney declarations regarding what should happen to them if they are ever in a position like hers. It definitely should be an option for those who are terminally ill and conscious, and their doctors should be able to help them. Prolonging life is not always in keeping with the Hippocratic Oath, specifically this part: “Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.”
I wish more doctors understood that caring for a patient does not always mean keeping their bodies alive through the indignity of a living death.
Actually, DoctorJ said just that: often the hardest part is the wait, for the family.
I am not a doctor but my mother worked for years with palliative patients, and anecdotally, if you are officially Not Gonna Make It, it’s not such a bad way to go.
Yes. Normal sleep-wake cycles are characteristic of a persistent vegetative state, because the reticular activating system of the brain is still intact.
I’m pretty sure my father died of a combination of starvation and Demerol. He had intestinal cancer and ate almost nothing for a couple of weeks. And he was pretty much kept under the influence of Demerol. The weakness from almost no food, the cancer taking most of what food he was able to take and the inactivity from the Demerol resulted in pneumonia which did the job. I think this is a fairly common ending for people with terminal cancer.
Just a nit-pick, but what would happen to Terri Schiavo is actually fast starvation. Slow starvation is what happens when a person is fed less than the minimum amount of food required for survival, and results in the body slowly wasting away, as can be seen in pictures of famine sufferers and concentration camp victims.
From the Los Angeles Times, here is some information on theeffects of no food or water on those who are greatly weakened by some existing medical condition.
Schiavo isn’t as weakened as those with a terminal illness but with much of her brain gone it seems questionable to me whether the impulses generated by the automatic nervous sytem actually register as pain, hunger or thirst.
I know from personal experience that as you get older you might not really get hungry at all. One of the problems with old people is that we often don’t eat properly because we are not really hungry. I know in my case when my wife is working at her volunteer job I frequently skip the noon mean and don’t really miss it hardly feeling any hunger at all.
The agonized cries about how horrible “starving her to death” is seem misplaced to me since those who voice them have in mind a starving a normal, healthy individual and not one who has no mental function.
Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but unless you can demonstrate to me conclusively that she feels no pain I will continue to think that she is suffering all the pains of hell. BTW, good luck proving that. Get my point?
I can (theoretically) pull any random cadaver which hasn’t deteriorated too badly from a slab in the local morgue and animate it artificially by applying electrical impulses to the muscles. With the right equipment set up, I can also make the heart beat and ventilate the lungs. If a person’s autonomous nervous system performs these functions instead of my hypothetical machinery, how does that fundamentally alter the rights to which this person is entitled?
Airman Her cerebral cortex is mostly gone. The human body has limitations. Sure sometimes people overcome those limitations. This isn’t one of those times.
I don’t get people like you. There’s reams of documentation; you have posters here describing in great detail what her condition is…yet you ignore it.
Why do you need to believe this woman is suffering?
And in addition to that there is the fact that has been litigated to death that her wishes were to not to have extreme measures used in the case of what has happened. The evidence produced for that convinced the Florida court and that court’s finding has been upheld in hearing after hearing up and down the court system year after dreary year. In that case it doesn’t make any difference what anyone else wants. As lawyers and medical people have said over an over again, if you force unwanted medical treatment on someone it is assault.
I agree that if a person conciously chooses to die in this fashion then that is their right, I also think that a person in pain should have the right to die by injection/lethal cocktail etc. Although I see that the system could be open to abuse by grabbing relatives (I’m not commenting on any particular case with this comment BTW), and old relatives could be persuaded to quietly slip away.
I especially agree with the comment on the “indignity of a living death”.
But we have evidence from one person that quick starvation is not painful, it is not really a representative sample, nor does everyone respond the same to a given set of circumstances. I think that each case should be reviewed on its own merits.
If a convict is on death row, about to be excuted, and the governor gets wind of something compelling, he can grant a stay of execution or a even a pardon. The courts can’t ell the governor “no”. (Maybe the president has the same authority).
Do you have a problem with that?
No?
Then why can’t the governor/president do the same thing when a patient is about to die from withheld food/water, and they get wind of something that may suggest the person is not a vegetable?
I have no problem with that.
All of you want who want to make it some anti-Bush thing, you’re just showing where your real interests lie.
The hypothetical isn’t the same as the Schiavo case. In the latter instance the patient, who isn’t a condemned criminal and not under the Governor’s purview, stated that no extraordinary measures were wanted.
And I suppose your comment that the governor got “wind of something that may suggest the person is not a vegetable” is referring to Jeb Bush’s statement that a neurologist had studied “medical records” and thinks that Schiavo might have limited consciousness.
I have some questions about that. I don’t see how the medical people treating the patient would release confidential medical records to someone who is not a part of the medical group treating the patient. And if this “neurologist” was taken in as a member of the team wouldn’t he or she be bound by the same confidentiallity as the other doctors? And as a medical professional wouldn’t this individual give a possible different diagnosis to the other team members and not to an outsider such as Jeb Bush? So what "neurologist"and what “medical records” are we talking about? I heard Bush make his claim on TV and it was pretty vague. Bush’s whole statement sounds to me like that of Bill Frish, MD who made a diagnosis based on what he had seen on TV.
I wish I wrote the guys name down but one the radio yesterday they mentioned a doctor (who shared in a Nobel prize in medicine) who felt this case may have been misdiagnosed.
The point here is if there’s even a gjost of chance that this woman is “alive” in the brain sense, we should take one last look. Once she’s physically dead the game’s over.
I don’t give a damn over who did what and for what reason (politically), as long as the poor woman gets one more examination.