Wednesday, April 13, 2011
COMMENTS:
Death in America is an agonizingly complicated medical, ethical, and religious nightmare..
My mother, 73, was on vacation 3000 miles from home and wound up having mitral valve replacement in an Roman Catholic Hospital and became stranded and a prisoner, fully conscious, on life support machinery for 118 days (the longest ICU patient in hospital's history at the time) with no possibility of removing the ventilator.
Worse, she was a follower of Christian Science and NEVER wanted to be on life support machinery PERIOD. Further complicating the matter, my father convened the hospital's Medical Ethics Committee and INSISTED that "everything medically possible" be done.
In other words, he felt the "crushing burden of responsibility for a loved one's life" and panicked, despite the fact that he knew he was going against my mother's wishes.
In my case, I have filled out all the directives and I would be FURIOUS if doctors consulted my relatives (I have no immediate family, only cousins).
As I said to my father three days before my mother mercifully died: LET NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE.
Unfortunately, with the advent of Emergency Room Entertainment on television, NATURE is increasingly trivialized and medical intervention valorized in our culture's ongoing euphoria of technological self-congratulation.
UGH.
Paul D. Keane
M. Div. '80
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