"Neither 'Starvation' Nor the Suffering It Connotes Applies to Schiavo"

[flpoljunkie]

Neither 'Starvation' Nor the Suffering It Connotes Applies to Schiavo, Doctors Say

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/national/25starve.htm...

Evoking concepts like starvation is especially powerful, said Dr. Sean Morrison, a professor of geriatrics and palliative care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, because "we are so familiar with what it feels like to be hungry" and have experienced the heartbreak of images from famine-ravaged regions.

<>"No one is denying this woman food and water," Dr. Morrison said. People in a persistent vegetative state, he said, "have no knowledge of food." "They don't recognize food," he continued. "If you put food in their mouth, it would sit there until they took a breath, and then that food would go down into the lungs."

Withdrawal of nutrition is a common method for ending life, and many terminally ill patients choose that course, Dr. Morrison said. "I have never had a patient who has stopped eating and drinking who has expressed that they are hungry," he added.

<>In the case of Ms. Schiavo, experts say, the potential for discomfort is nonexistent because higher functions like consciousness and the ability to sense pain were destroyed 15 years ago when she suffered the loss of oxygen to her brain.

Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell hospital, said that "the window of opportunity to be diagnosed as even minimally conscious" closes within three months of oxygen-deprivation brain damage. Based on evidence accepted by the courts that Ms. Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state and not in a more conscious state, Dr. Fins added, "the part of brain that allows one to suffer is not functioning."

And that, he said, "should be reassuring to people who are concerned."

[Midlodemocrat]

1. I have posted about this many times.

My SIL had her feeding tube pulled and lived for seven weeks. She did not suffer at all. She was not in a PVS, but dying from end stage cancer. She was alert, conscious, interactive and never once asked for something to eat or drink. She did occasionally have a small spoon of yogurt, but we believe that was under her attempt to survive and only after being coerced into it.

She never, ever suffered. My brother wouldn't have allowed it. She was never, ever in pain.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Thank you for posting your experience again. I had somehow missed it.

[Midlodemocrat]

3. I hope I didn't come across as a know it all

That wasn't my intention. I guess I am just frustrated with these people who are insisting she is suffering. She isn't. Let her go. It is way past time.

[flpoljunkie]

10. You absolutely did not. Thank you for sharing your personal story.

[luvLLB]

4. My mother was in the same condition. There was no suffering,

and I did keep asking if she wanted anything. She told me she just did not want any food, and for me to please understand. I did, and she passed quietly after about 8 days.

[deutsey]

15. People need to understand that this is part of the dying process

Thanks for sharing your experience.

[demwing]

5. I'm not arguing this

but I am curious as to why they are giving her morphine.

Do you know?

It seems to me that if the body does not suffer, then there is no need for such a step.

I must be ignorant of some of the facts, someone please correct me :)

[Midlodemocrat]

7. I think it might be to assuage the family's fears that she is in pain.

When my dad passed this summer, he was in a coma, and according to his doctor unable to feel anything. They gave him morphine, mainly, I think, because I was so distraught about him being in pain. He was a very stoic person in life and I didn't want him to suffer.

[ElectroPrincess]

14. It's some sort of "policy" to administer morphine ... not linked

directly to her case. The Hospice doesn't want to get sued. If the Right Wing screams lies long enough, it becomes truth don't cha know?

[demwing]

16. Thanks to both of you

4 taking the question serioulsy, and providing non flamable answers.

[etherealtruth]

6. Though no physician,

I was a hospice nurse (prior to retiring to raise my kids) and that was my experience over and over. It is a natural process---that in the case of T.S., was interrupted.

As a note to those who claim a gastric feeding tube is not a medical intervention: an order must be given by a physician to insert the feeding tube, a surgical procedure is performed in order to insert it, the particular substances "injected" into the tube for nourishment must be ordered by a physician------This is a medical procedure!

[onenote]

8. thanks - I'm so sick of the "Starved to death" argument

It drives me nuts when people say Schiavo is being "starved to death". There was one idiot who claimed that the poll numbers in favor allowing Terri to die would be much different if the question was stated "Do you favor starving Terri Schiavo to death." Of course, if someone was on a respirator, no one would ever think of asking the question "Do you favor suffocating" that person.

onenote

[etherealtruth]

9. Touche

[Jeff in Cincinnati]

11. Possibly a dumb question...

Why not simply give her some form of lethal injection? Is it just flat-out illegal in all cases? It seems wantonly cruel (to the family, not the patient) to go through would could be an agonizingly long "death watch."

[flpoljunkie]

12. Yes, that would definitely be illegal.

[flpoljunkie]

13. Kick!