LITTLE ROCK, Ark.--The most
That's when a burning roof collapsed over the head of the Buffalo, N.Y., firefighter, leaving him blind, brain-damaged, largely mute and completely unaware of his surroundings. Or so it must have seemed from the outside looking in. Doctors held out little hope of his ever regaining consciousness, for Donald Herbert of Rescue Company 1, 2nd Platoon, had been deprived of oxygen for several crucial minutes.
This father of four had fallen into
Because, on April 30 of last year, the vegetable spoke. Indeed, he rattled on for 14 hours, much to the astonishment and delight of doctors, nurses, family, fellow firefighters and surely everybody else who'd heard about his case.
Many of us have heard of PVS before, notably in Terri Schiavo's media-saturated, legally complicated, medically contested, personally agonizing, politically polarizing, just-plain-awful case and scandal.
Vocabulary is always the crucial ground on which these life-and-death issues are fought, and, as a label, "persistent vegetative state" is a good example of how the terms in which a debate is conducted shape its outcome. This one tends to dehumanize the patient, even de-animalize him.
Paul McHugh, university distinguished-service professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, has explained, in Commentary magazine, the origin--and effect--of the term persistent vegetative state in judicious language, as befits a physician and professor:
"It is perhaps because such patients display so lowered a state of vigilance that, in striving to define their condition, neurologists lighted upon a metaphor contrasting vegetation with animation. I remember teasing the admirable clinician who first coined this term that I had seen many patients but few carrots sleeping, waking, grunting, or flinching from pain. Although the term 'vegetative' does distinguish what is lost from what remains in such a patient's capacities, it can also have the unfortunate effect of suggesting that there is something less worthy about those in this condition."
Would any of us know what dreams were being dreamed, what memories relived, what delights rehearsed, what nightmares endured, within such a mind--a mind we do not know quite as much about as we may pretend?
When Terri Schiavo was denied food and water by order of the court, it took her 13 long, slow, agonizing days to die of dehydration. Thirteen days. It would have been kinder to shoot her. But that would have been against the law, and we know the law is just.
Funny how, long after you've forgotten everything else about some big story, one detail will stick in your mind. Have you ever sat by the bedside of a dying patient--a father or mother, perhaps, or someone else you loved--and given the patient a little chipped ice? And seen the relief and inaudible thank you in the drug-dimmed eyes? After all the futile treatments and the succession of helpless doctors, when grief has come even before the death, you sit there with a little cracked ice
However much or little the ice might help your patient, it does wonders for the caregiver. You suddenly realize why people go into nursing. Can there be any greater satisfaction than this?
But when the law decreed that Terri Schiavo was to be given no food or water, it meant no food or water. That's what the court, the sheriff's deputies, the whole clanking machinery of the law was there for--to see that the severe decree was carried out. That's what the new art and science of bioethics at the dawn of the 21st century had come down to in the end: No cracked ice for Terri Schiavo.
The doctors and nurses who had cared for her for years were now forbidden to give her even a single chip. That's the detail that has stayed with me.
What arrogance to decree that, because we deem another's life not worth living, it must be ended. But that is the spirit, or spiritlessness, of the age.
How far we have come from poor, backward, modest Hippocrates, who advised us: First do no harm. Ah, but how much more we have learned since his time. How much more advanced we are now! Yes, and how much we have forgotten. As knowledge has expanded, wisdom has shrunk.
PAUL GREENBERG is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.