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Jaguar
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Montgomery County, MD
Apr 2000
time: 00:30
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Living will is the best revenge
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published March 27, 2005
Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here's what mine says:
* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.
* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.
* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.
* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.
* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.
* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.
* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.
* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks of politically calculated bloviation.
* I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since childhood.
* I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if Congress passed a "Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health coverage.
* Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress - especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in "less government and more freedom" - to trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who actually know something about my case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.
* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an opportunity to divert the country's attention from the mounting political and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.
* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.
* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.
* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent vegetative state, I'd want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in my case because it is always best "to err on the side of life."
* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to anyone under DCF's care.
* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what's best for me, I won't be in any position to argue.
Robert Friedman is editor of Perspective. He can be reached at friedman@sptimes.com |
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:30
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quote:
Originally posted by Q Cubed
quote:
I don't know so much about the starvation angle, but it is said that dying of dehydration is pure agony. To all of you who flippantly say you are going to exercise a living will authorizing the pulling of a feeding tube, imagine yourself lying there, unable to communicate, and slowly dying of thirst. |
It's not flippant. Agony or no, lacking a cerebral cortex as she did, I wouldn't mind.
And if I did have some sort of consciousness, being unable to contribute to society and being a drain on resources... :shrugs: what's the point of existence then? Especially that even now, when I can contribute, all such contributions are moot in the long run? The agony, the pain, the suffering, all of it would be cathartic... and moot.
Pull the plug. I'll be sent to a better place, I hope. Hell, even Purgatory would be better than this Hell we currently call existence.
It's why, as supportive of the sanctity of life as I am, couldn't really back the rightists here.
That, and it didn't feel right to be fully aligning myself with the pro-death penalty anti-euthanasia anti-abortion crowd on the right. |
You are assuming that PVS means no consciousness. The problem with this analysis is that PVS is broader than that, at least in this case. There was overwhelming evidence that Terry possessed consciousness at some level. She still recognized her mother and said Hi to her. Terry could talk. Terry could swallow. Terry could cry and laugh.
The judge in the case was always careful to gage his remarks in terms of "quality of life" reasoning, opining that Terry would not have wanted to live on in this condition because most Americans would not.
It is also interesting to note that the issue of PVS itself was hotly contested. The Judge relied on three physcians, two appointed by Schiavo and one by the court, to ultimately rule that Terri was in a PVS because she had no hope of recovery.
Now, the three doctors who delivered these reports spent no more than 45 minutes with Terri. One only 20 minutes. Two of the three had no prior experience with PVS patients. The protocol for diagnosing PVS requires examination over a good period of time, under different times and conditions, to rule out responsiveness. Clearly that was not done by these doctors.
Numerous nurses however testified that Terri was conscious, could swallow and could talk. That testimony was discredited by the Judge.
The diagnosis of PVS under these circumstances was a travesty.
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01-04-2005 03:22
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