Posted on 11/20/2006 1:49:59 PM PST by presidio9
okkkkkkkk
Make sure that's in your Living Will. You have every right to demand that your family bear the emotional and financial burden of taking care of your severely brain damaged body as long as science allows.
This is about you. Remember that.
How about that? WIKI confirmed what I said. That makes me look like an authority, now doesn't it?
Not in the consciousness area. That portion of the brain IS dead.
No
Ah, I see. You think that "vegetative state" and "persistent vegetative state" mean the same thing.
Not that we easily allow a misdiagnosis of any other illness.
I am saying that, by definition, PVS is permanent. If it's not permanent, then it's not PVS. It's something else.
I simply fear that the euthanazia mindset inevitably proceeds from right-to-die, to duty-to-die, and I don't think that's right. You make good points though. And I went through this with my mother, that's why it's personal to me.
Interesting post and discussion.
life
Will that be regular or drip grind, sir? "
And that sometimes even strongly held opinion changes as result of experience - my MIL, who eventually declined months or years of what seemed to be a reasonable quality of life started the process in a “keep me alive no matter what” frame of mind, and I'm sure there are plenty of examples of people who went the other way.
There's a form I got a while back on the net that’s instructive in this regard, it has a list of mental states “You have been declared brain dead”, “You are conscious but can no longer recognize your loved ones”; and so on across the top, and a list of medical interventions “You have gangrene, and you foot must be amputated or you will die”, “You must be placed on a ventilator or die, but it may be possible to remove it later” across the top.
You check a box at each intersection to elect or decline treatment.
This really helps to remove such questions from the theoretical and place them in a real world context: “If I have dementia and I can no longer recognize my loved ones, and I get pneumonia, do I what aggressive treatment, or just palliative care?
IMO a lot of difficulty – for ourselves, our decision makers, and medical professions - would be avoided if we all had advance directives based on this sort of decision making process.
Sorry to hear about you mother - my wife and I have been through three of these, both in-laws and my father, and it's never easy.
See above, posted to myself by mistake.
"Declining it's continued use, for myself, if the improvement effected was only from a "vegetative state" to a "cognitively severely disabled state", and declining its use entirely if such improvement was then likely to be used as a justification to keep me alive in such a state."
Yup...I agree 100%.
Robert,
You're trying to use logic and reason. That doesn't work on pro-life fanatics. They use a different rule book.
I agree with you. There is no point in keeping someone's body alive if the "person" inside is gone. Why have an empty shell take up valuable resources that could be used to actually save a life?
With regards to the "Nazi" picture...we're not talking about killing retarded people, we are talking about letting someone who is essentially already dead finish the dying process.
"That portion of the brain IS dead."
And your authority to state that is?
"A brain-dead individual has no electrical activity and no clinical evidence of brain function on physical examination (no response to pain, absent cranial nerve reflexes (pupillary response (fixed pupils), oculocephalic reflex, corneal reflexes), absent response to the caloric reflex test and no spontaneous respirations). It is important to distinguish between brain death and states that mimic brain death (eg. barbiturate intoxication, alcohol intoxication, sedative overdose, hypothermia, hypoglycemia, coma or chronic vegetative states). Some comatose patients can recover, and some patients with severe irreversible neurologic dysfunction will nonetheless retain some lower brain functions such as spontaneous respiration, loss of both cortex and brainstem function. Thus anencephaly, in which there is no higher brain present, is generally not considered brain death, although it is certainly an irreversible condition in which it may be appropriate to withdraw life support."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_death
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