House Panel Seeks to Keep Schiavo Alive

[The Kizzy]

With stem cell research, I bet they can fix her.

[DangerPaul]

stem cell research is only good for South Park to make jokes about including Chris Reeves

[Zanchief]

With stem cell research, I bet they can fix her.

If she were Wolverine, she would be fine now by now.

[DangerPaul]

Her adamantium skeleton crushed her brain and caused all this.

[Martrae]

So stem cell research would regenerate her brain???

Damn that's some good shit!

[Zanchief]

Damn...that sucks.

Was it the Canadian government that did it again this time?

[DangerPaul]

I do not know what you are talking aboot, eh.

[Zanchief]

Read up on your Marvel lore boy~

[Rust]

Hate to break it to you Rust, but I would do the same for my kids, would you?

I've already watched my mother die from a stroke that left her in a PVS. I told the doctor to DNR her. If her heart hadn't stopped I'd have ordered them to withdraw support.

My kids would be no different.

--D.

[Rust]

With stem cell research, I bet they can fix her.

Brain growth isn't like a bone marrow transplant. The development of the brain from the early embryo is a complex process that is tightly coupled to the development of the embryo chemically and physiologically.

Even if you could physically regrow the missing brain tissue, how do you replace the missing person? Every memory, every scrap of personality, everything that made her Terry is gone, lost with the brain cells that held everything she was. Why not take the money and effort that would be needed to regrow her missing brain cells (which wouldn't bring 'Terry' back anyhow) and use it to work on the cure for some disease.

--R.

[Donnel]

Naw, how about Cosby's. "Noah"... "WHAT?!?" ... "How long can you tread water?"

-Arlos

I love that one.

[Martrae]

I'm just praying she goes quickly.

[Lyion]

Would be nice if she died and our Government could quit interfering in peoples lives.

[Rust]

Instead of hanging around in a permanent state of lingering death, unable to depart.... like Taxx on these boards.

--R.

[Harrison]

But Zanchief, their are so many different Christian sects, who's "God"s seem utterly incompatible with each other. So, even if you're restricting your choice to Christianity, which sect do you pick? National Socialists? Mindia's version? Catholic? Unitarian? Amish? Quaker? Christian Scientist? Branch Dividian? Who's "God" do you pick? It's like Baskin Robbins of Religion.

Anyway, the absolutely reprehensible cynical opportunism by the Republican leadership in all this is what is absolutely most galling for me, I think. I'm not real fond of her parents, either. I wouldn't want my parents fighting to keep me alive if I was a vegetable, and my parents are also Roman Catholic. Not to mention, I know for a fact that THEY wouldn't want to be kept alive like that either. Fortunately, both of them were foresighted enough to get that down on paper, with a living will, but still...

-Arlos

Any politician would use anything for their own personal gain.

[Martrae]

Starvation Is Not a Painful Way to Go, Experts Say
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
By Karen Kaplan and Rosie Mestel Los Angeles Times

After suffering through cancer, the middle-age woman decided her illness was too much to bear. Everything she ate, she painfully vomited back up. The prospect of surgery and a colostomy bag held no appeal.

And so, against the advice of her doctors, the patient decided to stop eating and drinking.

Over the next 40 days in 1993, Dr. Robert Sullivan of Duke University Medical Center observed her gradual decline, providing one of the most detailed clinical accounts of starvation and dehydration.

Instead of feeling pain, the patient experienced the characteristic sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete lack of food and water. She was cogent for weeks, chatting with her caregivers in the nursing home and writing letters to family and friends. As her organs finally failed, she slipped painlessly into a coma and died.

In the evolving saga of Terri Schiavo, the prospect of the 41-year-old Florida woman suffering a slow and painful death from starvation has been a galvanizing force.

But medical experts say going without food and water in the last days and weeks of life is as natural as death itself. The body is equipped with its own resources to adjust to death, they say.

In fact, eating and drinking during severe illness can be painful because of the demands it places on weakened organs.

``What my patients have told me over the last 25 years is that when they stop eating and drinking, there's nothing unpleasant about it -- in fact it can be quite blissful and euphoric,'' said Dr. Perry G. Fine, vice president of medical affairs at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization in Arlington, Va. ``It's a very smooth, graceful and elegant way to go.''

Schiavo, who hasn't had any food or water since Friday, has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years that makes it impossible for her brain to recognize pain, doctors say.

``Her reflexes with respect to thirst or hunger are as broken as her ability to think thoughts or dream dreams or do anything a normal, healthy brain does,'' Fine said.

But even if her brain were functioning normally and she were aware of her condition, she would be comfortable, doctors say.

``The word `starve' is so emotionally loaded,'' Fine said. ``People equate that with the hunger pains they feel or the thirst they feel after a long, hot day of hiking. To jump from that to a person who has an end-stage illness is a gigantic leap.''

Contrary to the visceral fears of humans, death by starvation is the norm in nature -- and the body is prepared for it.

``The cessation of eating and drinking is the dominant way that mammals die,'' said Dr. Ira Byock, director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. ``It is a very gentle way that nature has provided for animals to leave this life.''

In a 2003 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 102 hospice nurses caring for terminally ill patients who refused food and drink described their patients' final days as peaceful, with less pain and suffering than those who had elected to die through physician-assisted suicide.

The average rating given by the nurses for the patients' quality of death was an 8 on a scale where 9 represented a ``very good death'' and 0 was a ``very bad death.''

Patients deprived of food and water will die of dehydration rather than starvation, unless they succumb to their underlying illness first.

Without fluids, the body loses its ability to maintain the proper balance of potassium, sodium, calcium and other electrolytes in the bloodstream and inside cells.

The kidneys react to the fluid shortage by conserving as many bodily liquids as possible.

The brain, which relies on chemical signals to function properly, begins to deteriorate. So do the heart and other muscles, causing patients to feel tired and lethargic.

``Everything in the body is geared toward trying to maintain that normal balance,'' Fine said. ``The body will do everything it can to maintain this balance if it's working well.''

Meanwhile, the body begins mining its stores of fat and muscle to get the carbohydrates and proteins it needs to make energy.

``If you mine too many proteins in the heart, it gets unstable,'' Sullivan said. That can give rise to an irregular heartbeat, which can cause the patient to die of cardiac arrest. Or, if the muscles in the chest wall become weak, the patient can end up with pneumonia, he said.

Patients already weakened by disease begin feeling the impact after a few days, Fine said.

They eventually descend into a coma and finally death. The entire process usually takes one to two weeks, although a patient who is otherwise healthy -- such as Schiavo -- could hold on much longer.

Throughout the process, the body strives to suppress the normal feelings of pain associated with deprivation.

That pain of hunger is only felt by those who subsist on small amounts of food and water -- victims of famine, for instance, or concentration-camp inmates. They become ravenous as their bodies crave more fuel, said Sullivan, a senior fellow at Duke's Center for the Study of Aging.

After 24 hours without any food, ``the body goes into a different mode and you're not hungry anymore,'' he said. ``Total starvation is not painful or uncomfortable at all. When we were hunting rabbits millions of years ago, we had to have a back-up mode because we didn't always get a rabbit. You can't go hunting if you're hungry.''

After a few days without food, chemicals known as ketones build up in the blood. These chemicals cause a mild euphoria that serves as a natural anesthetic.

The weakening brain releases a surge of feel-good hormones called endorphins.

Doctors also have a host of treatments to ameliorate acute problems, such as sprays and swabs to moisten dry mouths and creams to moisturize flaky skin. They can also administer morphine or other powerful painkillers.

Sullivan said doctors are likely to give some to Schiavo, although, ``frankly, I think they might as well give it to each other, because it will probably be more painful for them than it will be for her.''

That makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing.

[Harrison]

Damnit someone ninja edited me again, I feel both loved and angry.

[Adivina]

That was a really interesting article, thanks

[Langston]

Starvation isn't a painful way to go? Interesting - the people who were starved in internment camps in WW2 might disagree.

That whole article was put out in an attempt to assuage the feelings that some of us have about starving the woman to death. It didn't work.

[LostCause]

Indeed

[Lyion]

Starvation isn't a painful way to go? Interesting - the people who were starved in internment camps in WW2 might disagree.
.

You'd have to poll the ones who have no upper brain activity.


Being in a persistent vegatative state, there is no pain from not recieving nourishment. They can still medicate her and monitor her pulse and blood pressure to ensure she is not stressed, which they are doing.

[Langston]

Reread the article, Lyion. The article is implying that it's a painless way for ANYONE to die... and they extrapolate from that that it is therefore not painful to this woman.

Regardless of what "feel good" bullshit reports that are purported on the people of the US to try to make everyone "comfortable" with starving a person to death, I won't be comfortable. There are better ways. There are ways to have more respect for her than to just yank her food tube out and let her dehydrate.

If you can't see that, then I pity you.

[Lyion]

That whole article was put out in an attempt to assuage the feelings that some of us have about starving the woman to death. It didn't work.

My response was in regards to this.

She won't feel any pain while she dies of lack of nutrition. It's just like an elderly person dying in their sleep. I do not need any assuaging.

I agree it's not ethical to starve a 'HEALTHY' person. However that isn't the issue here at all.

We don't allow Kervorkian behavior, so if someone wants to die this is the only option. I'd be all for allowing people a more dignified way to die, but it opens a Pandora's Box as much as the silly congressional measures passed to try and override the Judicial Branch.

[Harrison]

Not that I expected much more from you Ug...

In fact, eating and drinking during severe illness can be painful because of the demands it places on weakened organs.

``What my patients have told me over the last 25 years is that when they stop eating and drinking, there's nothing unpleasant about it -- in fact it can be quite blissful and euphoric,'' said Dr. Perry G. Fine, vice president of medical affairs at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization in Arlington, Va. ``It's a very smooth, graceful and elegant way to go.''

It doesn't apply to normal people at all, just the sick as it FUCKING SAID.

Normal people starving is a completely different subject entirely.

[Martrae]

Maybe I misread something, but I thought they were talking about people who were already dying not healthy people.

The premise being when the body is already failing, hunger and thirst don't cause additional discomfort.