Random Thoughts, A Follow up

Ricky said how long would you allow someone to be on a ventilator before you consider them to be dead? A week? A month? A year? Who has the right to make these decisions?

Two years back my wife went to the emergency room with an infection. The surgeon looked at it and determined that she had a flesh eating bacteria. He scheduled surgery right then and took her away. After surgery i was with her and they took her to her room. I stayed until about 9:00 pm and went home. Very early the next morning the surgeon calls me at home and tells me that my wife can not breathe on her own and wanted permission to put her on a ventilator. Now a ventilator is life support. If you do not breath you will die. It is supporting your life. Of course i said to do it. It was in my mind a "no brainer".

I hauled butt up the hospital and she was in CCU with tubes and probes everywhere. Now to me this was a simple solution. Her need for the ventilator was a short term need. She had brain activity and everything else. She was simply fighting a bad infection with a positive outcome. The prognoses was very favorable for my wife.

Your probably asking why i tell you this. Have you ever heard of a living will? Suppose she had a living will that stated she didn't want to be on life support. They would have let her die even though she had a high probability of survival. You see a living will does not pin point anything. It is written using very broad and imprecise language, giving rise to the idea that all treatment options are morally equivalent.

One widely available living will called the " 5 wishes" offers questionable options and morally dubious choices to the patient by including, as but one example, the following series of check-boxes:

Permanent and Sever brain damage and not expected to recover: If my doctor and another health care professional both decide that i have permanent and sever brain damage, (for example, i can open my eyes, but i can not speak or understand) and i am not expected to get any better, and life-support treatment would only delay the moment of my death:
___ I want to have life-support treatment.
___ I do not want life-support treatment. If it has Ben started, i want it stopped.
___ I want to have life-support treatment if my doctor believes it will help.

Now in this scenario your life is in the control of a doctor. What if he is having a bad day? What if that morning his wife told him she wanted a divorce? Do you want to trust your death to someone else other than a loved one?

This is a topic we could talk about for days.