Terri Schiavo: Court decides when you die?

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Optimus

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I live in FL, so I hear about this case a lot. In case you're unfamiliar, it's the one with the woman who's been brain dead (basically) for the past 15 years with no reasonable hope of recovery.

However, her family wants to keep her on life support, praying that there's some magical miracle cure right around the corner for her type of hideously extensive brain damage.

There's not.

Even if they were to throw billions of dollars into stem cell research, it wouldn't matter.

Nearly 99% of her neocortex is dead. Gone. Never coming back. There's nothing there. No mind. No personality. No Terri. She has brain functioning which is less than that of a fish (that's not an exaggeration. It's an appropriate comparison, structurally).

However, Gov. Jeb and his congressional cavalry are now trying to draft and implement "emergency legislation" to outlaw the court order allowing her feeding tube to be removed, thus continuing to keep this shell alive. A breathing corpse.

I sympathize with the parents. I can't even imagine the pain one must experience when they lose a child. However, to delude themselves with false hopes that she'll recover and continue to sustain a lifeless body is sick, IMO. It's the fault of two doctors, who told the parents that there's "no way of being 100% certain that there is no higher order brain functioning." Basically, they were saying that there's no way to prove the unprovable.

But, when your neocortex is dead, so are you, so considering the fragile emotional state the parents are in, I find it ethically appauling that those two doctors mentioned that to the parents, when about 100 other experts in the field have disagreed with them.

I think it's a sad day when the government can determine when you die. Is this a sign of things to come, where family members will selfishly sustain your mindless corpse for the sake of their own emotional satisfaction?

Again, I understand the pain they must be going through, but I find their actions disgustingly selfish and, frankly, torturous. Personally, I find the whole situation (but especially the actions of those fighting to keep the body plugged up) deeply, deeply disturbing.

And, if you are spiritual/religious, what affect do you think this would have on your soul (your mind dying yet someone keeping your body alive)?

If you were brain dead, with zero chance of recovery, would you want your body to be plugged up to a bunch of machines for years and years, keeping that shell alive? Or, would you rather have just died in peace, body, mind and spirit together?


Just thought I'd throw out a controversial topic to get a good discussion going.
 

sthrnwriter

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If I was in Terri's situation, I would want them to just pull the plug. I can sympathize with the parents. It's hard to determine their child's fate. I'm not sure if it was the right thing to do with having the Fl government step in on this matter. But the parents want to hold on what little hope they have left that their daughter is going to get better and maybe they need a reality check. Maybe the best thing for her is to let her go, let her be at peace. Thats just my opinion.
 

Optimus

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She's not outwardly "comatose" in the sense that most people understand it (unconscious sleep). But, she is essentially brain dead. There's no higher functioning at all. All PET and CT scans have shown that pretty much her entire neocortex has been obliterated from apoxia.

Neocortex is the outer covering of the brain that basically makes you who you are, in simplest terms, and makes you a person.

The only functioning parts left of her brain are basically her midbrain and hindbrain - things such as her pons, medulla, and cerebellum.

Those parts of the brain control things like the sleep/wake cycle, breathing, heartbeat, and orienting your eyes to stimuli (superior colliculus). All are involuntary reactions and don't require a "thinking brain" to do them.

That's one of the arguments of her parents, that she "looked at" a Mickey Mouse balloon that moved across the room. Well, her eyes oriented to it as it was a new stimulus, but it is an involuntary reaction of the primal parts of her brain. She was never able to replicate that type of reaction because there was never any actual thought behind it.

They say she "smiled" at her mother once, but that was just a muscle reaction, probably stretching, which is also controlled by the lower parts of the brain (stretching is actually a primal movement, not a thoughtful one). There was no intention or thought behind the smile. She also did the same thing, randomly, as the doctor examined her neck, at various intermittent times during the week, etc.

These movements are not voluntary. No part of her brain that controls voluntary movement is still alive. Brain cells (for the most part) don't grow back and never will. Usually someone with brain damage can compensate when another part of their brain takes over (always located in the neocortex). All parts of her brain that could do that (compensate) are dead.

So, while she doesn't appear to be outwardly comatose, as in asleep/unconscious, she is definitely brain dead in the sense that she has no consciousness and no chance of ever recovering consciousness.

It's sad, really. She's basically a fish.
 
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MacAllister

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From what I've read of the case, Jenna, she isn't precisely comatose--but there isn't enough cerebral function for her to regain awareness.

The family is pretty squeamish about removing the feeding tube, though, because the result is that she essentially starves to death--not a pretty way to go.

Her husband is the one fighting her parents/biological family for her right to die.
 

Nivvie

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Brain injury is a subject close to my heart, as I used to work in a brain injury re-hab unit. Most people don't understand that your brain is essentially you.
There are people in there who have fallen off rooves or been hit by busses, had very nasty viruses and such, who are un-recognisable to their families.
Someone who was a kind and love father can now not only be a permantly violent wreck who refuses to acknowledge his own children, but also it's the little things. Someone who used to hate coffee might suddenly drink it by the gallon, where there used to be an afinity for animals or children and such, there is nothing, or vice versa.
They should let her go. They can't rebuild a broken brain, as although connections can remake themselves with time, they are usually related more to physical movement and functions and frequently practiced therapies. They won't get their girl back. I have seen people manage to learn their own names again, to hold a spoon, but this takes a very long time and these people a certain level of brain activity to start with.
 

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Optimus,

Is this the case where the husband wants the life support taken off because he knows his wife didn't want it and the parents are fighting him about it?

If it is the same case, I heard on the news just the other day that some businessman offered one million dollars to the husband to try to bribe him into letting the parents have their way. I think the whole situation is sad.

My oldest daughter and I have a difference of opinion in cases like this. I would not want to be kept alive by artificial means and have me or my family put through such an ordeal. My oldest daughter, on the other hand, says "but, mom, what if a few years down the road they find a cure?" My answer is "then the cure came too late for me." This is the very reason there are "living wills," which allow you to state exactly what you want in situations as these.

I had a stroke at age 38. It took me six months of rehab to get my speech back and learn to walk again. After 14 years, I'm still relearning everything that I "once" had stored in my brain. I was lucky. I still joke about my "dead zone" when words won't come to mind. In fact, it is my sense of humor that kept me going. Had my stroke been worse and I had been in a vegetative state, I wouldn’t want to be hooked up to machines. As a writer, there was nothing worse to me than losing part of what made me who I am.

My heart goes out to Terri’s parents, but I also think they’re selfish. This poor girl is not living a life she dreamed of living.

Joanne
 
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JennaGlatzer

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Boy, that's a tough situation. I think it would be so much easier if she was actually comatose... then the parents wouldn't "see" their daughter there. But because she's actually awake... how do you pull the plug on someone and watch her die?

I just don't know how I would feel in that situation. Is she in any pain? Is she suffering at all? (If there's no brain function, she can't be self-aware enough to know about her condition.) I guess my question is, how does it harm her to keep her alive?

Three out of four of my grandparents starved to death. Horrible freakin' way to go.
 

Sheryl Nantus

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I think everyone in the media's forgotten a basic fact here.

She's not going to die (or cease movement, or whatever) the minute they pull the feeding tube.

oh, no.

SHE'S GOING TO STARVE TO DEATH.

My family went through this decision with my grandfather almost twenty years ago. He had a genetic disease that curled him up into a ball, but his brain was still functioning. At one point, however, he was so sick with pneumonia that the doctor spoke to my grandmother about stopping medical intervention and allowing nature to take it's course as it were.

He then explained to my grandmother that when you pull the feeding tube, a person doesn't just die. The body reacts like every other thing in the world when you pull main nourishment - it begins to eat itself. Your stomach hurts; your bones ache and you turn into those pictures we all winced about of starving African children in Somalia and elsewhere. Your body doesn't know you want to die so it keeps on working and working, shutting down organs and devouring muscle and tissue to stay alive.

Meanwhile, the person is in a lot of pain. A LOT of pain. This isn't like turning off a respirator and the lungs stop moving. You can live for up to TWO weeks in this state before your body gives up and you die.

We jail people who do this to animals. We spend millions on foreign aid to help starving children elsewhere. But we have no problems pulling a feeding tube and allowing a person, vegetable or not, coherent or not, alive or not, to literally starve to death before our very eyes.

Better to just take a gun and shoot her between the eyes - be faster and more efficient. Let her husband do it, since he seems to be all eager to help her "move on."

'nuff said.



 

Betty W01

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I have lost a child (suddenly in a freak car accident), so I can sympathize with the parents. What an awful spot to be in. I agree with Frank and Mac, too, though. I hope I'm never faced with something like that. Is she breathing on her own, heart beating by itself, and so on? I guess I'd say, taking someone off artificial life support is one thing. Taking someone off food and water and allowing her to starve to death is quite another, no matter how she is functioning.

It seems to me like saying, well, if you can't produce, converse, move around, be part of society anymore, then you'd be better off dead. That's a pretty slippery slope. At what point does it become a twisted form of playing God - you have value [whatever that means] to society, so you can live. You don't, so you die, and since you won't die on your own, we'll starve you to death. Where do you draw the line?

And I have to wonder - is the husband her heir? If so, I'd be a little suspicious about his desire to take out the feeding tube. At the very least, it presents a conflict of interest.

My heart goes out to everyone involved in that sad situation.
 

maestrowork

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Didn't the woman already express the wish to be let go? That the husband was trying to carry out her wish?

That's why we should always have a living will. I mean in such a case, even your next of kin can't make the call, because the court/government is going to intervene.

I can sympathize with both sides. But I think it's wrong for the government to intervene. What does Jeb Bush know about his woman and her family? Who makes him King to try to decide?

And let me ask: what is the benefit for keeping this woman alive? Is there any chance she would come back and lead a normal life again?

I think the parents are selfish, too. They're not thinking of their daughter's quality of life, but their own selfish emotion because they don't want to let her go. If she's brain dead like Optimus said she was, there's no reason why she should be kept "alive" because she's not "alive." IF she is "brain dead" -- she wouldn't even feel the pain. I don't believe in starving her to death -- that's just cruel.

I think the doctor should enthanize her.

We do that to pets because we love them and we don't want them to suffer. Why can't we do the same to people we love?

Like Reph, I think the parents in denial, and they're selfish.

A friend of mine -- his mother died of cancer. There was no hope whatsoever, and the family had to watch her dwindle to death. There was no quality of life, $$$ was spent keeping her alive, she was suffering from all kinds of pain and indiginity. They couldn't do anything for her. She died at the hospital after three months of pain and suffering. All they could do was to see her suffer and eventually die.

And the family finally asked, after the whole ordeal, why? They wish they could have a way to let her go before she lingered in pain for three months, without dignity.

I think letting someone linger and die in pain is the cruelist thing you can do to them.

When I go, I want to go in dignity. I don't want to go in pain and in bed with crap all over me and to see my loved ones suffer as much as I do.
 

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I have heard a lot about this case too and just thought I would mention a couple things. She is not on life support, only on feeding tubes, so as somsone else said she would starve to death which could take a couple weeks.
Also, this woman's husband (allegedly) has not allowed her to have any rehab since this happened, nor has she been allowed to have many visitors. She's doesn't have a radio or television. Something about the husband doesn't seem right to me.
I cannot imagine being in this womans situation for 15 years. Not being able to let out her screams for help or something, whatever it may be. Bf and I were talking about this last night and he was as emotional about it as I was.
I don't know if anyone here listens to Coast to Coast (radio program) but there was a woman on who had a stroke and the doctors told her husband they should just pull the plugs and he said no. What happened was she was aware of everything and couldn't let anyone know that! Finally her husband got her blinking signals and now she is a talking, walking (still slightly paralized on her left side) woman.
I wonder if Terri's husband allowed her in the beginning to have some kind of rehab, would she be okay? Maybe after 15 years it is too late for that now.
I am not an expert in this area, I am just throwing out ideas.
Another thing that crossed my mind, if he knew his wife wanted this WHY has it taken 15 years? I've only been hearing about this for the past 2.
Maybe a verbal contract in this kind of situation doesn't work...always put this kind of thing in writing (on video even), make it clear from your own self.

Tough tough situation. :(
 

Nivvie

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I don't know how you do it in America, but in my experience of withdrawing feeding tubes we also withdraw all drips, therefore people don't starve to death, they die of dehydration first. This only takes a couple of days usually, and as someone said, if brain dead, there is no pain felt.

Also, with withdrawal morphine is usually also the norm, and this not only slows the heart rate to help the situation along, but also removes all pain and any hint of consciousness with a large enough dose. So in a way, with the morphine and dehydration, a form of euthenasia is taking place, albeit a bit slow, but that way it's legal.
I have never known a case of someone being left to starve for two weeks.

Every case is different and I think there does need to be a certain amount of legal intervention to make sure no one takes advantage of the situation, but generally, the only way to make a serious kind of brain injury better is with the aid of a time machine.
 

Betty W01

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People are not pets, to be "put to sleep" at the whim of an owner. And to start asking about someone's "quality of life" in order to decide whether they live or die is a very slippery slope. Who decides that? What do they base it on?

I would think that history would have taught us the danger of someone choosing life or death for someone else based on the one in charge's thoughts on their victim's "quality of life" or "human value" or whatever. Think about the slaves in the south, who were considered on a level with animals, and whose life or death was at the whim of an owner. Kind of like a pet, maybe? Some owners treated their slaves well. Others treated them worse than they treated their livestock. Either way, they were treating people like property, like animals, like something with no intrinsic value, despite the Bible (which most of them would have claimed to believe in) having a lot to say about how to treat other humans. Of course, they didn't think Africans *were* human...

Or consider Hitler's treatment of anyone who wasn't a purebred Aryan. (Ironic, that, since he wasn't purebred, either.) The Jews had no human value, no value at all, in his eyes, not even doctors and lawyers and scientists (inividuals whose abilities would make them valuable, you'd think) and the treatment of the Jews at the hands of his followers included examples of some of the worst treatment humans can inflict on one another.

I remember once reading a quote something like this: God gives life to each one of us, and He decides when that life will end. Mankind does not have this gift. We cannot create life from nothing. We cannot grant life to someone God has marked for death or raise from death someone who has already died. Only God Himself can do those things. Therefore, it would behoove us to be really careful about deciding to take life away from someone.

I liked that.
 

maestrowork

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But in this case, the woman is brain dead. It's not a naive, emotional judgement. It's medically proven that this woman won't "come back." To keep her on a feeding tube, to me, is more cruel than letting nature take its course.

A brain dead woman is different than a slave who's been treated badly, or a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany.

I'm not saying humans are the same as animals. I'm saying the feelings are similar. We euthanize a pet because we don't want it to suffer -- we want to do what's best for them, despite our own selfish feelings about death. Because we love our pet. Why can't we feel the same about someone we love when we know that there's no quality of life possible (as in this woman's case, when she's medically brain dead).

My cat died in December, after close to 2 months of "treatments" administered by me. The illness was terminal -- the vets had already given up hope, but I wanted to try. I kept wishing she would get better and have a better life, but she didn't. She suffered so much. After she died, I wish I had taken her to be euthanized, instead of subjecting her to all that treatment and suffering (IVs, force feeding, diarrhea, vomiting, etc. etc.) When she died, her spirit was completely gone, and I didn't think she appreciated me at all.

That made me really sad. I wish I had let her go with more dignity. I have to live with that regret now.



Obviously, I'm not advocating euthanizing a human being under any circumstance. That's just absurd. But in some cases, personally I'd specify in my living will to be euthanized. Leave me some dignity, please.


I don't want to bring religion or faith into this discussion, because this shouldn't be about religious beliefs. Still, I think we ARE playing GOD when we forcefully keep someone alive, when she is already brain dead -- when nature already tells us: she's dead. What would God do if the woman were left on her own without all these tubes stuck in her? God would have taken her into heaven. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. If we believe in God, we should know that death is only the beginning. And death is not to be feared.

To me, God has told us she's dead. It's the human who's playing God, keeping her body functioning with a feeding tube.


To me, none of these people (the husband, the parents, Jeb Bush) are thinking what's best for the poor woman. They're all selfish. They all have their own agendas. And I think that's the saddest part of the story.
 

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Lately, I came across some interesting facts and new twists in this, um, event.

I learned that her husband was approached twice and offered money not to pull the plug on her. One recent offer was for a million which he turned down. To be fair, it was also pointed out by the writer of the news article that he no longer has a say since the courts decided the matter. Even if he took the money, he couldn't stop it.

However, I also learned that he was offered ten million much earlier, apparently when he did have some control over the outcome. He refused that as well. Taken together, I don't think this is about any money as far as he's concerned.

Now for the interesting twist. It appears that Congress is stalling the removal of the feeding tube by calling her as a witness. That means Federal agents are now tasked with the responsibility of keeping her alive even though we know she's unable to testify and probably never will. Still, it's a novel approach which I dare say we will see repeated someday in some other case, perhaps one involving a death row convict.
 

Nivvie

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maestrowork said:
I think we ARE playing GOD when we forcefully keep someone alive, when she is already brain dead -- when nature already tells us: she's dead. What would God do if the woman were left on her own without all these tubes stuck in her?

Very, very ture.
The things that are done to people to keep them alive are playing god in themselves, therefore we are forced into making these decisions.
The world would be one hell of an over crowded place if every nation had access to these facilites.

To genuinely not play god in any case we have to have no intervention, and see what happens.

There is a little girl in this country who is very disabed and after years of treatment doctors are refusing to resussitate, and her parents have been to court to fight this.
Their plea was rejected, but since then, their daughter has started to respond to treatment and making leaps forward.
Whether it has anything to do with a God or not is irrelevant to me. As I see it she wants to live, and so she's doing her best to do that, regardless of doctors or machines.

There is a section of the brain injury unit where I worked which is nothing but people with no brain activity. Rooms and rooms full of people not capable of doing anything other than breathing. It's a strange sight to see so many beds, so many sad stories, and so much nothingness. It really is soul destroying, and not many nurses stay long, as it seems to defeat the object of nursing. You know that nothing you do makes any difference, and no one is getting any better, just made steadily worse with the effects of inactivity.

We do need to be careful, but we shouldn't forget we are just human animals after all. We have to die one day, and I think if your time comes and you are held back from it artificially to the point of barely exisiting anymore, that's interfering with the natural process of the world.

And now for the bit where I make everyone hate me.
I have financial motvies too.
In a country where there is a national health service, we all contribute, and it's a case of first-ill first-served.
It costs approx £500 (an underestimation to be safe) a week to keep a person in this state, that's about $900. That money is paid out of the fund that everyone in this country has to pay into. Meanwhile, a person (even a child) that might need expensive cancer treatment can be deprived, and have to either raise the moeny themselves or suffer and/or die. It means that people with serious painful and treatable illness can be left to the side as they happened to get ill after the braindead person. That's about £24,000 a year, and the unit had 20 beds, so nearly half a million a year. If you add the outside costs of doctors and drugs not footed by the home, it gets even bigger. Then consider these homes are hidden away all over the country, and million and millions are being spent. Compare to the benefits of an air ambulance, something that saves so many lives, but because of funding there are only a few.
I have stood and watched so many people die who didn't have to, and although I don't want to weigh one life against another, when there is limited funding and a child with a future suffers or dies because a braindead person is kept stable, we have to ask ourselves if we are using our medical skills in the best way.

That's how it is in some national health systems anyway.
 

jdkiggins

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My dad had a stroke which eventually led to dementia. He had a living will stating he did not want to be kept alive by "any" type of artificial means including feeding tubes or IV's. Dementia eventually takes over the brain function and the person stops eating. Yes, he stopped eating, due to the disease he had. By this point he quit talking, but he was aware of what we said and nodded his head. We tried coaxing him to eat, but he pursed his lips, frowned in anger, and pushed the food away. Within a few weeks his body began to shut down. A night duty doctor, who didn't see the "living will" in my dad's file, told a nurse to put an IV in his arm for nourishment. By morning, my dad had pulled it out. Watching someone die is not an easy thing, especially when you know they are starving and wasting away to nothing. I do know that even though my dad had dementia, he still had moments of awareness and one of those moments was when he pulled out the IV he didn’t want.

Poor Terri may not even have that ability. But she did tell her husband she didn't want this.

Joanne
 
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reph

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Betty W01 said:
I guess I'd say, taking someone off artificial life support is one thing. Taking someone off food and water and allowing her to starve to death is quite another, no matter how she is functioning.
Both choices seem like positive acts: doing something, as opposed to doing nothing. Either of them would seem like a negative act (doing nothing) if we take the view that starting life support was the "something" and stopping it reverses that act and restores the original condition of "The doctors aren't doing anything."

A bias is built into the way people think about what amounts to doing something and what doesn't. I don't think we're always rational in making such evaluations. When we view a person's behavior as doing something, we tend to attribute greater responsibility, whether or not our view of the behavior as a "something" is more correct than other ways to look at it. However, the law recognizes negligence – failure to act – as culpable, too.
 

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I also live in Florida so I hear about this case all the time and frankly I'm steaming mad about it. Terri as a person has been dead for 16 years -- 16 years...think about that. The parents want to make the husband out to be a monster -- as do some of the posters here -- but she has been like this for 16 years! All of the things the parents are claiming signal her beign alive, are involuntary reflexes...the only reason she woudl have to starve to death as Sheryl likes to point out, is becuase this country won't allow people to humanely end thier lives. The people who are protesting the feeding tube being taken out are the same people who protest medical advancements with things liek stem cell research -- pick a side already! They want to "save" her for a cure, but they are against all advancements in medicine..Duh! it makes me sickthe way that the government feels that they have a right to step in...this is a personal matter...and these same "spiritual" people who are protesting are the ones who say that a husband and wife's bond takes precedence over the parents...that would mean these people are being hypocritical in saying that its not the husband's decision...I'm getting so mad I think I might go down there and protest against the protestors! (not really but I'm really tired of these people who are out there praying to keep her alive when if you think about it 16 years of prayer should have already helped her improve somewhat if it was going to help at all.)
 
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BradyH1861

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I have a living will and a medical power of attorney as well, but in case that fails, I am putting all of you on notice that I do not want to be on life support or a feeding tube, nor do I want any extreme life saving measures to be taken.


Brady H.
 

Maryn

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I'm there, Brady. Done it before, can do it again--and I can stare down any doctor when I know I'm right...
 
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