For the Record

[saffronhare]

This is copied from ursulav because she said it so well. I'll be revising my will/living will before my next birthday to reflect this as well, and have already put it in a letter to my parents.

I'm thinking that our Memorial Day SOS is going to have a lot to do with CPR/First Aid training and updating/creating our living wills.

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For the record--not that my parents are that crazy, but since Congress and Dubya seem to have a wild hare up their asses on this one, I figure I might as well state it as [publicly] as possible--if I have no brain and am in a persistant vegitative state, LET ME DIE, ALREADY.

Seriously. If anybody's trying to make an argument like "She might not be totally brain dead!" frankly, that strikes me as even worse. Mother of god, at least people in jail for 15 years can walk around the cell and read books. If I'm that far down, let me go. Being a tiny, non-sentient voice crying in the dark of a broken brain is not how I wish to spend my allotted span.

The really noxious thing about all this is that we're even having the discussion. Generally the discussion is good, but in this case, it's just idiocy. This ought to be a non-issue. It should be absolutely and positively none of the government's business. We really need a party in power that's opposed to big government interefering in people's personal lives.

Like...oh...there was a party like that once...can't remember the name...

Comments

[kittenpants.livejournal.com]

Take a look at the brain scans in this case. Do some research on what normal or even comatose brain scans look like. It makes it all pretty clear to me.

She's never coming back. She'll never "wake up". The brain is dead.

And why the @#$% is euthanasia illegal in this country? ARGH. Starvation is fine, but mercy is illegal. WTF.

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

The brain is 'dead' to today's science. Thus my mention of a brain jump-start. Not currently feasible, but since the brain does not rot or go septic, I have a feeling that in the future, there will be a re-initialization procedure. The problem is, is grey matter like RAM where memory is lost when it goes dead? Or is it like flash memory where it is burned into the mush? ::grin::

That being said, I do not expect the technology to re-boot clinically dead brains to develop within our lifetime. Let Terri die, and do it humanely. That's that Hoo-doo I didn't like about medicine, they get very caught up in the Hippocratic Oath, and not using their knowledge to harm. That's fine when you are arguing against genocide, but I think it is misapplied in 'living dead' cases... or in so many of the cases I witnessed while working in healthcare. Old women (and some men) pleading with me to let them die still haunt me... they were close to dead at the hospice, and the hospice would ship them to the hospital where they would get rehab'd into better shape, then shipped back to the hospice. F-cking idiotic, and inhumane as hell.

And then they try to guilt old folks into not shooting themselves when they get old. Gah!!! I'm not sure what my opinion will be at 80, but for now, I hope I am not left to get bedsores... if all the kids are grown and taking care of themselves, I would have to make sure I have an option -other- than being 'living dead'.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Mac, have you looked at the actual brain scans from Ms. Schiavo? We're not talking about abstract cases here.

I'll see if I can find some link... here, try that one, and if not look up "schiavo cortex scan OR fluid" in Google.

I waffled back and forth on this one for a while, but the evidence of the neutral guardians, medical staff who have actually examined her, and the full video (not the "tracking a balloon" edit) all seem to agree that she is non-responsive and extremely unlikely to improve. (http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/03/20/regarding-the-cat-scan-of-terri-schiavos-brain/) ()