First of all, my apologies to those who found my gripes yesterday grating. My issue was not with the topic itself, but with the preponderance of threads. If you think this topic is important, as many do, it stands to reason that you'd want fewer threads instead of more; that way, any and all good comments or data would be less likely to get missed.
But I bow to the inevitable and post this, the 374th thread on Schiavo. And yes, I have been counting.
Five years ago, in the days before the millenium, my grandfather put on his hat and coat, kissed his wife goodbye, and went to the hospital to get a number of ailments he was living with checked out. Somewhere in the process, he vomited some bile into his mouth and aspirated it into his lungs. Bile, as you may or may not know, is catastrophically damaging to respiratory tissue. He immediately went into respiratory arrest, and the shock to his body caused a cascading system-wide failure of several major organs.
By the time I got to the hospital, he was unconscious and wired into several different machines. One of the machines was a respirator, and the air being pushed down his throat made his whole body heave up and down as if he was fighting his condition. He wasn't. It was the machines. His body had basically destroyed itself, and he would need those machines to keep him alive for the rest of what remained of his life.
This man was, not to put too fine a point on it, the godhead of our family. His was one of the greatest minds of his generation, his personal and professional accomplishments would need another 374 threads to adequately describe, he was the most decent and honorable man any of us in his family had ever or would ever know, we loved him beyond words, and we had to decide what to do. After a long, agonizing debate and discussion, all of us decided that the best thing to do was to turn off the machines and let him go if it was his time. We did so, and he was gone.
This past winter, my grandmother suddenly came down with horrific and debilitating pain in her abdomen. By the time we got to the hospital, she was literally deranged with agony. The doctor's discovered that a major artery feeding her digestive system had collapsed, and most of her colon had died. It was like a heart attack, but in her bowel. Here was the Hobson's Choice: If she did not have surgery to repair the damage, she would die of sepsis in agony. But the surgery itself could easily kill her because of her advanced age. We opted for the surgery.
The surgeon was able to repair the damage, but at the very end of the surgery, her blood pressure cratered and she was put on several machines to keep her alive, one of which was yet another respirator. The doctor told us she would never come off it again, and if she survived, she would be eating through a tube in her throat for the rest of her life and unable to speak. Her blood pressure was not improving; the nurse told me they had given her the same amount of blood pressure medication they'd give a 300 lb. linebacker to no avail.
Another conference, another agonizing decision to turn off the machines and the blood pressure medication. She was gone before the sun came up. Understand: My mother and her brother had to decide what to do with both of their parents and the machines they were attached to.
Anyone who thinks decisions like this are reached casually is deranged.
Anyone who thinks decisions like this fly in the face of some kind of 'culture of life' are foul hypocrites. I get the sense that if Ms. Schiavo had been an Iraqi boy, an African American child, a Hispanic mother, an Afghani grandmother, an American soldier suffering massive brain trauma from an explosion in Mosul, anyone from Darfur or the Congo, if she had been anything other than a white woman in a Fundy-controlled state, we would have never, ever, ever heard of her.
Anyone who thinks Congress should be serving in the role of mother, father, husband, wife, doctor and priest in any situation like this has absolutely lost their minds.
Had someone tried to stop us from implementing our decision, after all the doctor's advice and the prayer and the tears, that someone would have taken an IV stand across the skull. It is nobody's business but the family involved, and the fact that such a thing has become a political football is perhaps the most nauseating public display I have ever witnessed.
But understand. This is coming:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031605A.shtmlThey are going to try to kill the filibuster. If they do so, the courts will be flooded with the same kinds of people who have initiated this farce surrounding Schiavo. Their way of thinking will become, without recourse, the law of the land.
Many people see this Schiavo thing as an example of the fundamentalist takeover of the country, and they are right. The looming fight over the filibuster is not merely an example. It is the last line, the firebreak that cannot be breached, the Alamo.
Endgame.
I devoutly hope that, when the time comes to beat back this filibuster thing, that 374 threads will be started, and all of them geared towards killing this idea before it kills us.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
