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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (77619)	10/16/2003 7:04:34 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

It is a pretty upsetting scenario, charged as it is with a husband who took the medical malpractice money and then placed a DNR on his wife, and is at odds with parents and siblings, and a patient who seems to show a minimal reaction that might or might not be involuntary, but is not in a clearcut PVS (persistent vegetative state). Personally, I would not want to live like that. PVS sounds better than what this is. She can follow a balloon with her eyes, she can maybe smile. The parents say that she can still be taught to swallow with therapy. This does not strike me as a quality of a life that I want my family to pour their resources into, or the taxpayer for that matter. Still starving and dehydrating a person to death is just- inhumane. I watched my mother die like that- and it's not an easy death. As someone asked, why not just shoot her and get it over with? This is nicer? These are the unanswerable questions we get when we find we can keep people alive interminably with feeding tubes, by technical means. We can-- but do we want to? I am going to talk to Dan about all this. It's the sort of thing we all avoid. You are so wise to have taken care of it. Although I do think you are a terrible person to eat the food off his plate like that. After all, your life is in his hands. You want him well-fed and happy with you.

To: Lane3 who wrote (77619)	10/16/2003 7:50:45 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I was peppered with questions about that over lunch. And this from the guy who holds my medical power of attorney. He was outraged about it. I didn't know enough about it to hold up my end of the conversation. Have you found out enough yet to hold up your end of a discussion, whatever that end might be? If we're going to discuss this as a group here on SI we need to understand up front that we will not come to a resolution, and that to have any such aim would be futile. The best we can do is to understand the dymanics, explore the implications of various moral and ethical positions, and try to comprehend why people might feel the way they do. But agreement? Never. There are certain issues on which there simply cannot and will not in our lifetimes be agreement. (I would have said ever, but there may be breakthroughs in the next few thousand years which allow us actually to reach agreement.) One thing that worries me -- how do they KNOW that she isn't feeling pain or deprivation? People who are dying that way don't have the ability to say whether or not they are in pain. Somehow starving to death seems to me a particularly gruesome way to die. If I REALLY don't know it's happening, that's one thing. But if deep down inside I knew but couldn't express that knowledge to those who were starving me, I for one would be mighty upset.