L.A. Times on the “Euphoria” of Being Starved to Death
Patterico's Pontifications
Filed under: Dog Trainer Schiavo— Patterico @ 7:22 am
The L.A. Times has a story today about how much fun it is to be starved and dehydrated to death. I kid you not. The story describes the “characteristic sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete lack of food and water.”
Euphoria.
There is zero mention of the perspective provided by Kate Adamson, who was mistakenly diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, had her feeding tube pulled, and lived to tell about it. I told you about Adamson’s experience the other day, in this post. Among other things, she said:
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When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I was – thought I was going insane. I was screaming out don’t you know I need to eat. . . . [T]he hunger pains overrode every thought I had. . . . It was sheer torture . . .
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Adamson told Wesley J. Smith that it was worse than when she had abdominal surgery:
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The agony of going without food was a constant pain that lasted not several hours like my operation did, but several days. . . . I craved anything to drink. Anything. I obsessively visualized drinking from a huge bottle of orange Gatorade. And I hate orange Gatorade. I did receive lemon flavored mouth swabs to alleviate dryness but they did nothing to [slake] my desperate thirst.
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Some might say that it would be different for Schiavo, because Schiavo is incapable of feeling pain. Smith says this is manifestly not true:
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[I]t is undisputed that whatever her actual level of awareness, Terri does react to painful stimuli. Intriguingly, her doctor testified he prescribes pain medication for her every month during the course of her menstrual period.
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So why the discrepancy between the L.A. Times version and Smith’s? Smith explains:
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An accurate discussion of this sensitive issue requires the making of proper and nuanced distinctions about the consequences of removing nourishment from incapacitated patients. This generally becomes an issue in one of the following two diametrically differing circumstances:
1. Depriving food and water from profoundly cognitively disabled persons like Terri who are not otherwise dying, a process that causes death by dehydration over a period of 10-14 days. As I will illustrate below, this may cause great suffering.
2. Not forcing food and water upon patients who have stopped eating and drinking as part of the natural dying process. This typically occurs, for example, at the end stages of cancer when patients often refuse nourishment because the disease has distorted their senses of hunger and thirst. In these situations, being deprived of unwanted food and water when the body is already shutting down does not cause a painful death.
Advocates who argue that it is appropriate to dehydrate cognitively disabled people often sow confusion about the suffering such patients may experience by inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, blurring the difference between these two distinct situations.
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The L.A. Times joins this list of “advocates” today. The story relies on discussion and studies about terminally ill patients. But Terri Schiavo is not terminally ill.
The bottom line is that we don’t know whether Terri Schiavo is suffering. A previous L.A. Times story, though it tried to portray her death as gentle, acknowledged that Schiavo might feel pangs of hunger and thirst. Kate Adamson’s story suggests that even people diagnosed as being in a PVS can feel such pangs as torture.
But today’s propaganda piece mentions none of this. It is simply designed to make people feel better about killing a woman in a way we wouldn’t tolerate for a pet.
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