Reply #22: Maybe the word "decision" sounded... [View All]

[punpirate]

... more moralistic than thoughtful. Apply whatever you glean from this to your own life, if there's a lesson in it for you. But, saying you've come to a decision about someone else's plight isn't quite that, it seemed to me.

On another thread, someone used the phrase "entertainment" in a post, and it occurred to me that this spectacle is a kind of perverse entertainment, one that the media has used (in the basest sense of the word) and it reminded me of a film from over fifty years ago--"The Big Carnival," from 1951. I would recommend it to everyone, and recommend to watch it with the Terry Schiavo case in mind.

If you understand why you're being inundated by the media with every seemingly infinitely small detail of this story, that knowledge may help you know why you're distracted by it, and perhaps, even why you've come to a decision about something the details of which you actually understand very little. Perhaps the media has led you to where you are now.

The reason I make mention of this is I have a friend who was an RN who spent several years rehabilitating people with brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and such. From experience, she had a pretty good sense of the range of injuries, including people who seemed barely cognitive, but who were, in fact, cognitive. She'd seen any number of patients who weren't.

Then one day a couple of years ago, she was coming home from work, fell asleep, rolled her car several times and ended up with a number of injuries, including a depressed skull fracture. By the time she reached the hospital, her brain had swollen badly, had several large hematomas and a fair amount of brain damage due to both the accident and the swelling, and she'd stopped breathing on the helicopter. She had an excellent neurosurgeon who stopped the bleeding, removed the damaged brain tissue, but wouldn't give any assessment of her chances.

At any point, her family could have said, in consultation with the doctor, pull the plug. But, in her case, it was worth waiting, said the doctor. So, she was kept in a chemical coma for a week, on a ventilator, and monitored. When she came out of it, she was aware, but in serious trouble. She's alive and well and still rehabilitating.

My point in saying all this is that even she doesn't want to come to any sort of opinion about the Schiavo case, because she's familiar, intimately familiar, with both sides of the ethical question, based on both personal and professional experience.

In talking with her, I have the feeling that she wouldn't have wanted to be resuscitated had she been in Terri Schiavo's condition, but wouldn't have wanted that decision to be left to her family, and was saddened by the thought of the hardship such a decision might have caused her family--very much the situation in which the Schiavos now find themselves.


Cheers.