I woke up this morning to Terri Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler on NBC talking about how his sister could get better if she had the proper training.
"It's clear to us Terri is very much alive and she just needs help," he said.
He was pleading for America to read the affidavits and read what the doctors have said about his sister possibly improving her condition.
He was pleading as a brother who deeply loves his sister for someone to step in and save her life.
But was he missing the point?
I think so.
Particularly if he is has listened to what her husband has said is the reason that he wants the feeding tube removed.
She doesn’t want to live like this.
Let me repeat myself.
Terri Schiavo did not want to live like this.
Republicans are on television trying to scare people into thinking that the courts are going to go around giving the go ahead to start killing their vegetable relatives in every hospital in the nation.
She doesn’t want to live confined to a bed with or without a feeding tube, drooling on herself, having people take care of her for the rest of her life even if the best speech therapist in Yale can teach her how to say “a few more words’.
Court-appointed physicians testified that Terri Schiavo’s brain damage was so severe that there was no hope she would ever have any cognitive abilities again.
So the blinking and drooling is about all you are ever going to get.
I understand that a brother or a sister or a parent may not want to hear what I am saying, particularly if it is their loved on that is the one that is in this condition, but I can totally understand not wanting to live like that.
I would think that anyone could.
I wouldn’t want to continue living in that condition and I welcome any one of you to use this article as my declaration that if I am ever damn near comatose sitting in a bed, eating through a feeding tube, can’t control my bodily functions or otherwise suffering in pain for the rest of my life, I do not want to continue living like that.
Respect my right to die.
How dare you keep me around for your selfish, and that is what it is, selfish reasons.
As someone who has lost two relatives recently to cancer over the past two years, how cruel would it have been if somehow doctors could have frozen the cancer at the stage that it was in just prior to it taking their lives and just keeping them in a hospital bed, eating through a feeding tube, barely coherent for years on end?
Have any of these Republicans or Jesus freaks ever heard of the term “quality of life”?
Does that mean anything to them?
That is what this is about.
Keeping someone around when their quality of life is practically non-existent just because you can’t let go is no different from those people who end up keeping grandpa’s corpse tucked away in a corner bedroom upstairs because Grandma can’t stand the thought of the closure of burying him.
You can understand what I am saying when it’s a corpse because the finality of the circumstance is so absolute at that point, I’m mean, he stinks for Christ’s sakes, but you don’t see it when all they are capable of is blinking?
Imagine if medical science could actually remove a human head, and keep it conscious, capable of sight, smell, speech, hearing and the lot, all while it was resting in a pan of fluids with several IVs connected to it.
Would you still be fighting to keep that head alive just because it could blink or smile?
Would you still be fighting to keep it alive even though you knew that whomever's head is sitting in that bucket of fluid told you that he wouldn't want to live like that?
Could you not appreciate someone’s wish to not want to continue living as a head free floating in a bed pan of reanimation fluid?
This should be inspiring conversations between Americans about what is life. What does it mean to be alive? Is it simply having a heart that is beating, eyes that blink and a leg that jerks when you take a hammer and hit me in the knee?
Or does the definition of living also involve your ability to actually participate in the act of living?
Whether you agree with it or not, you should respect the right of someone to say when it's time for them to let go.
And that time isn’t going to be the same for everyone.
And that is why we all should have our right to say when, if it is in fact a right, respected.
And don’t give me shit about how Jesus could have let go and asked God to spare him the pain and suffering of being nailed to a stake but he didn’t. So we should use that as an example and suffer, although we could choose to release ourselves from it, until our bodies give out naturally.
Well there isn’t anything natural about being hooked up to machines to live.
If I am not mistaken you think Jesus is the son of God and had to die for all of our sins. For all you know that could have been a condition of the job.
The last time I looked I was not the savior of anybody, nor the gatekeeper of who does or doesn’t get into heaven, so don’t ask me to live like I am the CEO without giving me the job.