Posted on 03/23/2005 5:09:24 PM PST by Hildy
You are in your 20's, and you're visiting somebody in the hospital. You pass by a room where somebody is all contorted up, in a vegitative state. Would you say to your husband:
a)Honey, Don't ever let me live in that condition.
b )Honey, If I ever get like that, please make sure you do everything in your power, whatever the cost to you and our family, financially and emotionally, to keep me in that vegitative state no matter how long it takes. I want you to come and sit by my side every day and go home alone every night. I want to have strangers tend to my most personal needs. If I don't respond in four or five years, make sure I'm kept alive by a feeding tube in my stomach. And, most importantly, if you're not sure if I know what's going on around me, please err on the side of caution and keep me in that bed, indefinitely.
Remember, you're 24 years old. Which one would you pick?
whoops make that you say to your husband or wife:
It's a stupid question. When I was that age I told my friends to shoot me if I ever got over 50. Well today I'm over 50 and if they start shooting, I'm shooting back.
At 24, I probably would have said, "Shoot me." Would that make it right for my spouse (or anybody) to do that? Of course not.
I have asked my wife to attempt to rehabilitate me first, something that is critically lacking in the Terri case....
"Bush is saving your ass whether you like it or not."
I sure as hell wouldn't say, "Honey, please make sure I'm starved to death".
You get a living will. If you don't have the sense to do that, you deserve whatever happens to you.
I've already begun the process of a living will directed at keeping me alive and appointing an attorney to make sure that wish is carried out. I have a right to live, and I'm not going to let some crazy wife or some crazy judge prevent it.
Pull the plug and live YOUR life, I'd say to my wife.
Had I known I was gonna live so long, I'd a taken better care of my teeth. ~ John Wayne
My honest answer is that my life is a gift and I am grateful for every moment of it: even if I am a turnip.
Constitutional bump
I needed that laugh.
As we get older, most of us have stood at bedsides of loved ones or friends who are hooked up to machines or have feeding tubes.
Every time I've stood there, whoever was standing with me said "I won't ever let that happen to me."
No one wants to live this way.
And personally, I feel as a woman to have my photograph televised a hundred times a day on the cable news channels would be the absolute last shred of dignity stolen from me.
B. In fact I just took my advanced directive to my attorney this afternoon. It says no breathing machines or feeding tubes in case of end stage terminal illness or permanent unconsiousness. In the "other directions" section of the form I specifically noted that if I am in state like Terri's the answer is still no feeding tubes.
Nothing like tilting the stupid question.
I would not want to be kept in a vegetative state.
The problem with your question is that Terri is quite possibly not in a vegetative state. So the exercise is quite possibly invalid.
What a beautiful, plump strawman you've constructed.
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