re: #80 reine.de.tout

I’m just now catching up, and your comment is as good as any other to move into what I would like to say.

I don’t know what sort of decision I would have wanted to be made had I been related to Terri Shiavo, or to the family in this story. I do know that based on the advice of my dad’s doctors, I did NOT opt to have a feeding tube placed into him when he stopped eating - he suffered heart problems, some sort of dementia - and as the doctor said, loss of appetite is part of the process of dying. My dad was dying. And while the feeding tube may have prolonged his life a few more months, it would have been another aggravation for him to deal with, and in his state, he didn’t need that.

However, I had the right to make and the responsibility for making that CHOICE, not some impersonal board somewhere. And as far as I’m concerned, that choice should belong to the person’s caretakers.

What creeped me out about the Terri Shiavo case was her husband, but not about his wish to remove her feeding tube. As her nearest kin and caretaker, that was properly his decision to make. What bothered me about HIM was, 1) Terri Shiavo had received some sort of financial award that, 2) her husband had access to as long as he stayed married to her which 3) he did, even though he moved on with his life and had a new partner and family, and 4) which is why, IMO, he did not want to divorce Terri and let her family take over her care taking, which they were willing to do. That bothered me - that he would hang on as her husband, despite the fact that she meant nothing to him anymore, in order to retain access to whatever was left of her financial settlement rather than turning it and Terri over to her family. If that money had not been there, I suspect he would have divorced her and turned her care over to her family early on.

This is what Terri Schiavo’s brain looked like when she died:

Image: Schiavo_catscan.jpg

She had no brain. The religious right lied to you about this story.

I cannot judge her husband. He spent many years trying to help her, and finally faced reality — and for that, the fanatics who exploited this woman smeared him relentlessly.