Boiling a frog

Terri Sciavo continues without food or water, but apparently with a drop of communion wine.

One issue is whether Ms. Sciavo would have wanted to continue living had she found herself in this condition.

Among callers to the talk shows last week were nurses who mentioned that patients who were in dire conditions would almost routinely change their minds. Once they were in those dire straits, they were willing to live in them rather than die. Or, as one of the taglines in my collection reads,

Despite the high cost of living, it remains popular.

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When we're in good health and at our full strength, we know we wouldn't want to live as a quadriplegic, or hooked up to a feeding tube, or on a respirator, or hooked up to machines, or as a brain in a jar or...

When that moment arrives, it's a whole different story.

The entire staff of the LA DWP was required to sit through the talk given by a man who lived through an explosion at an oil refinery. He managed to get thoroughly drenched in the flammable liquid before it went off. When he saw it start to go wrong, he ran for his life, caught on fire anyway, and survived because the pool of liquid he decided to dive into was water after all.

Suffice it to say, he went through hell. It's impossible to administer enough drugs to kill the pain without killing the patient first, and this situation continues for weeks, if not months. And then there's surgery, reconstruction, grafts, a painfully tight suit designed to prevent the formation of scar tissue, and more.

And there's a ripple effect. All the friends and family are affected. His father put on a brave face when he came to visit him in the hospital, then went home and had a stroke. His wife left him, and his daughters' lives went to pot.

Objectively, to a healthy 20-year-old sitting on the beach, it would seem better to just have died all at once, or be euthanized on the operating table. But he wasn't, and on the whole, I think he's glad. It's not a choice he would have made, but when it was thrust upon him, he chose to live.

We don't know for certain what Terri Sciavo's choice was. We have conflicting testimony, and nothing in writing. But even if we did, given the tendency people have to change their minds when they're finally in the situation, if there is anything left of Terri Sciavo inside that head, I don't think we can be at all certain she would still choose death.