By the time this goes to press, Terri Schiavo will probably be dead, and most of you reading this will have long been sick of hearing about her.
Schiavo, in case anyone has been living under a rock for the last three weeks, is the Florida woman who has been severely brain damaged since a heart attack in 1990. While she breathes on her own, she is unable to eat and has only very basic brain functions left. For the past 15 years she’s been sustained by a feeding tube in her abdomen, which was removed almost two weeks ago. She has had no food or water since.
This column, like so much of the media circus surrounding the Schiavo case, isn’t about Terri herself. It’s about the issues that surround the case.
When I took this column with the East Tennessean, I said that I would leave the political topics for others, since, frankly, hardly anybody reading this paper cares. But for me, this isn’t a political issue. It’s a moral and philosophical one.
There are few things more disgusting than the far right politicians who got involved in this case to appear moral and decent (like House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who is facing a long list of corruption charges in Texas), but in the end, I have to agree with those people (and the Rev. Jesse Jackson) on their conclusion – it is cruel to remove the tube and starve Schiavo to death.
What you don’t hear said very often, and it’s surprising, is that the Schiavo case really isn’t anything unusual or particularly unique. It happens thousands of times every day in America.
People like Schiavo who are unable to swallow, usually unable to communicate, are in severe mental decline and have never expressed their wishes in writing, are deprived of food and water at their legal guardians’ request. This guardian is usually their closest living relative, such as a spouse, parent or child.
Essentially, that guardian decides they’re tired of watching their loved one “suffer,” (and probably tired of taking care of them, or at least footing their bills), so they determine it’s time for them to go. And after agonizing days of no food and water, their suffering does eventually end.
While the medical establishment and media have said that it’s a peaceful death, as if Schiavo will simply give up the ghost and pass away, death from acute dehydration is anything but.
First, the mouth dries out and saliva becomes bitter. Then the skin painfully tightens across the face, throat and tongue as they swell. All of this coincides with excruciating headaches. Sometimes the eyes crack open and bleed, as does the throat, and the skin on the face shrivels to the point where the person is unrecognizable. The organs fail slowly, one by one. Eventually, after days of this, the patient finally succumbs.
This has been banished as a cruel and inhumane form of punishment in our prisons since the founding of this country, yet thousands of times a day, people pass this sentence onto their “loved ones”.
You don’t hear it reported because it’s a common practice that goes back for decades. At any nursing home in the United States, or in most of the world, you will probably find several patients at any given time who are willfully being starved to death at their guardians’ request.
While we don’t have doctor-assisted suicide or euthanasia (which would both be far, far more humane), it’s somehow considered less horrible to slowly let a person die over the course of several days.
That’s because you can always say you’re just “letting nature take its course.” Sort of like if somebody is hanging on a ledge and clinging to you for support, and you get tired and let go – you didn’t kill them, gravity did.
No blood guilt from injecting the syringe or pushing the button on a euthanasia machine.
Even a bullet to the head would be a better way to go.
The only reason that Terri Schiavo’s case has caused such a media frenzy is that her parents, desperate to hold onto their daughter, turned to Right to Life groups for support. Those groups did just what they’re created to do – they turned it into a hotly contested political issue, even though (legally) they have no leg to stand on.
I have to admit, that while I do find it detestable what’s being done to Schiavo, I have to laugh at some of the far-right crazies who have been demanding that someone bust into her hospital room commando-style, guns ablaze, and whisk Terri away to some undisclosed location where a makeshift feeding tube will be crafted from a McDonald’s drinking straw.
And yet the alternative, which is happening to her and thousands of others as you read this, is no less insane.
This doesn’t mean that I harbor illusions about what a horrible life it must be to be unaware, or almost unaware, of your surroundings, and I don’t blame families for not wanting to watch the people they care about degenerate to a state where they’re unrecognizable, but they’re doing their loved ones no favors by doing it this way.
As someone who has been in the room with a patient as they died from acute dehydration, I can speak from personal observation.
I hope if Terri Schiavo is still alive she’s so far gone that she really can’t feel pain at this point.
I hope the scientists and doctors who study those things are correct, even though I have to be skeptical in the wake of so much about the brain they don’t understand, and the constant new discoveries that contradict old theories.
In the end, there’s nothing any of us can do to save her, even a new feeding tube would be too little, too late.
God bless you, Terri – and God bless everyone else suffering the same fate.

Author