Fair enough, and understood

We were quote lucky unquote; my mom got pancreatic cancer and died of that before she couldn’t swallow.

But this case — whew. We’re talking about a woman who was in this condition for 15 years. This wasn’t an old person at the end of a long life. This was a woman who was fine one day, collapsed and never came back. Fifteen years! And she was barely middle-aged. Is the life she had a life at all? What was she, with a brain that weighed less than an end-stage Alzheimer’s patient? A profoundly disabled person? Or something else entirely?

Something else the honest doc told me: There is only one party capable of making this decision, and that’s the immediate family, the ones who knew her best. Terri’s husband made a decision. Her parents disagreed, and fought a truly desperate battle: See, she’s aware! Anyway, she needs therapy. Anyway, she wants to live — she tried to say so. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Something was definitely wrong here, but it wasn’t her husband’s wishes. It was people like that daft twit Peggy Noonan, saying, “She looks like one of those people who wake up and ask for a cheeseburger!” It was Bill Frist, a MEDICAL DOCTOR, willing to make a diagnosis based on an edited videotape. It was all the people willing to rattle this poor woman’s bones for their own ends.

I don’t think I’d have made the decision Michael Schiavo made. But I respect his right to make it. And I don’t think, in the end, what Terri endured on her way to death was any worse than what she endured between 1990 and 2005.

He was aged with a disability, but otherwise functioning and enjoying life. (Slow-developing Parkinson’s cramped his style but wasn’t going to kill him. Given his genetic history and lifestyle he could expect to live well into his 90′s.)

July 2003 he had elective surgury at Parkview Hospital to implant a deep brain stimulator. He drove to the hospital, was able to walk, laugh and talk. After surgery, he looked like a survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps. He told us repeatedly that something went wrong, that the surgeon, physicians and health care professionals knew it, covered it up, and were abusive to him. The hospital and physicians collected every penny they could squeeze out of Medicare and supplemental insurance. They left him for dead and said his inability to recover was due to his “mental attitude.” His family was left to rehabiliate him. The final blow came this spring when he couldn’t recover from the flu. Our family was torn about what to do. His children who didn’t want his illness and impending death to interfere with their vacation plans advocated putting him down. Other children took unpaid leave of absences, put their plans on hold, follwed his wishes and cared for him.

At the end, a neurologist confirmed that the surgery caused a stroke. Had we known that two years ago, he could have received appropriate treatment. My father’s death was unnecessary, cruel and expensive.

We passed on the autopsy because it was meaningless. The death certificate states apsiration pneumonia and complications from Parkinson’s. The truth was far more complicated.

What happened to my father colors how I view what happened to Terri Schiavo. Her death has broader and long lasting implications than we will ever know. I’m not a far-right nut case. Nor is Ralph Nadar. Nor is Diane Coleman or Senator Tom Harkin. Nor is Joan Didion or Jesse Jackson. There is something very evil and very wrong here.

agreed.

for the record, my complaint against post-autopsy “chest thumpers” doesn’t include you. The political forum where I waste the most time had the predictable food fight (pardon the pun) in the time leading up to her demise, and then the predictable (chest thumping) denouement after the autopsy.

All I’m sure of is: Rule of Law = a good thing; Petty Political Grandstanding = a bad thing; The Real Issues Raised by This Woman’s Fate = unaddressed

And yes, Mike, “culmination?” Ick.

My older son is going through the 5th grade to middle school transition also. They have a ceremony, but they call it “culmination” rather than graduation. I don’t care much for the term, since it sort of implies they’ve reached the peak of their lives.

As for me, I’m heading for the deck with my current read, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, and something with a straw.

The Tao of Steve

It also contradicts the story that she initially fell into this coma because of bulemia.

Jeff Feiger, who championed the cause of Dr Kervorkian back in the day, captures the issue when he asks what sense it makes to starve/dehydrate a person to death when we could give them a lethal injection and reach the same ultimate end much more quickly and humanely. But some people are too cowardly to address that – they’d rather thump thier chest about how “right” they were, and sneer at people who hesitated to embrace the process wherein a defenseless woman was slowly starved and dehyrdrated, until she died.