Misdiagnosing Permanent Unconsciousness
This is an important story, byline Carol Burczuk, the jist of which needs to be repeated until it finally sinks in: Just because doctors say someone is "unconscious," it doesn't mean they really are. Often, people are aware but cannot communicate--as in this story. Note, that people spoke about one of the patients as if he weren't there--even using the "V-word," which, disgustingly, the reporter just throws around as if it is okay to denigrate human beings to the level of a radish.(We really need some consciousness raising here!) In any event, it is a long article but it proves that where there is life, there is often hope, and when it comes to consciousness and awareness, we often don't know what the heck is really going on.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:36 AM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Congrats to the last family mentioned for their new baby. Ironic that you posted that right after I brought up the same exact thing on another post. This is why I err on the side of caution, as it were. I'd rather not pull the plug on anybody and instead let them live out their natural lives.
But you don't find out that someone is "locked in" until after she regains some kind of mobility - eye movement for example. Imagine being so locked in that you can't move your eyes right, either.
Terri's family was convinced she was still "in there," but she was starved to death. These families were able to prove that their loved one was still "in there." So what's the difference?
It's not fair.
Ah, but here is the heads we win, tails you lose, kind of argument you hear about this. It is even WORSE if they are AWARE. The suffering caused. Death is better. So, if they are unaware, dehydrate. If they are aware, dehydrate them, squared.
But surely a brain scan of a victim of this sort of strike would show normal activity, right?
It's so cool that they had a baby. My first reaction was that the husband was being kind of creepy, but then I remembered that she can still feel everything, and she can still say "yes", so now I'm thinking that being able to enjoy sex must be really wonderful for them. And really not all that different from some supposedly able bodied girls I've known.
John:
Not necessarily. Brain scans are tricky things. Like, I read about a family that insisted that their young daughter was not brain dead, even though her EEG came back flat-lined, and about two weeks later she woke up and was mentally fine after about a month.
So "normal activity" isn't a guarantee there. About the only way you know that the brain is totally dead is when there's no activity at all, including brain stem activity (and even then, some folks, in an attempt to argue against the reality of NDEs, will say that just because the brain stem is flat doesn't mean the brain is totally dead, yadda yadda).
So it's no guarantee that someone who's "locked in" will come up "normal" on a brain scan.
Wesley:
Reminds me of a Stephen King horror story I read where someone bitten by a snake and very much alive but believed to be dead (he was totally paralized) was about to undergo his own autopsy. Anybody who thinks that "pulling the plug" would be a kindness ought to read more horror novels about the messes that can be made, especially ones written from a first person POV. Absolutely terrifying.
One can say, "Oh, if that were me, pull the plug!" but they haven't experienced it totally themselves yet, so how can they accurately say that? It's like a guy trying to understand what being pregnant is like - you can only sympathize to a point, and after that, you have to admit that it's never going to affect you the way it does someone who's had a baby, so you can't say what it must be like.
That's why I say it's not fair. How can someone on the outside accurately decide what's good for someone on the inside?
It also harkens back to the "buried alive" fears of the 19th Century, exploited by Edgar Allen Poe. When I was a kid in the 50s, there were horror movies about that. I loved 'em. I very much oppose dehydrating people to death because we think they are unconscious or minimally conscious.
My problem: Unconscious is not the same thing as dead, and unconscious people do have stuff going on inside their brains - dreams. It's been shown that some people in seriously low or unconscious states do experience REM periods; again, brain scans and the like can't account for everything, so how do we know that they're not in there aware and awake and paying attention at the best, or, at the least, enjoying their dreams?
And if one doesn't believe there's an afterlife, then wouldn't it be better to let that person have her dreams than to up and kill said and leave her with nothing?
And babies dream - you can watch their eyes behind their eyelids move. They have thought processes - they identify objects and start to incorporate information into their lives from the moment they're born. But the rapid growing they go through makes them sleepy so they spend most of their time dreaming, and they have to dream about *something.*
This is why I don't buy into that nonsense that babies and children under two aren't "persons." They're small humans who are on a scavenger hunt to input as much information as possible in as short a period of time as they can, and they do! They're amazing - Stephen King (I keep brining him up for some reason) wrote about it in PET SEMATARY, where he noted that babies possess all the skills and abilities to make all the sounds from every human language, and it's only as they get older and tuned in to one language that they "forget" how to make those noises. That's why a young child exposed to many languages young can keep up with them all and be bi- or tri-lingual.
All I'm saying is that it's presumptious to assume that someone's life isn't worth living just because the body isn't all there all the time. The brain is the most amazing computer on the face of the planet, able to perform some of the most sensational feats, process more information than anything we can organize ourselves, and has billions and billions of gigs of memory to hold... wow. It can multi-task like no tomorrow, keeping heart and lungs and mind and thoughts and understanding and motor control - even if the link between the brain and body shuts down, the brain, so long as it lives, is still capable of the most amazing things.
We should have more faith in the human brain and in the Inventor of said, be it God or Nature, because it's the most remarkable invention ever, and we ought to respect the person residing within it and leave him or her to the dreams and memories and sensations and what have you that the brain is still able to produce.
It's only fair.
And we should have a little humility about our ability to know what is actually going on.
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