re: #476 Dianna

One thing, and only one thing: You’re from a family of nurses, and you keep referring to Shiavo as “brain dead”. She wasn’t. Were she brain dead, all that would have been required was pulling the heart-lung support, and we’ve all gotten to the point where we understand that one.

She may have been the Living Dead, and all the rest of it. But I’ve sat my share of death beds, and I’ve watched death. Starvation and dehydration - even with a morphine drip - is a dreadful thing.

The sheer, extraordinary cruelty of her death warranted a great deal of scrutiny. I still disapprove of that, and I’m not going to stop disapproving just because her brain was atrophied.

Mostly because I never saw that as the point, and still don’t. I didn’t buy her parents’ belief that she was still in there. I thought she was gone. But that death was dreadful.

Automatic, autonomous, unconscious functions such as breathing and heartbeat are controlled by the medulla oblongata, which is a knob at the upper end of the spinal cord. The cerebellum and the cerebral cortex, where sensation, perception, knowledge, memories, cognition, imagination, and personality happen, are quite different - and it was they that had been atrophied and nonfunctional for a long, long time.

There was no THERE there to feel anything any more. How can one be cruel to those who are forevermore incapable of feeling? All one can do is to end the continuing sad travesty of the misguided desecration of their remains.