You don't have to do anything to make ME happy - there is reallyonly one ultimate judge you need to please, and He is not me.
:0)
More on what is death by dehydration like -- it's NOT "peaceful":
A "Painless" Death? (Terri Schiavo)(Distinction between disabled person vs. terminally ill)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1368190/posts
An accurate discussion of this sensitive issue requires the making of proper and nuanced distinctions about the consequences of removing nourishment from incapacitated patients. This generally becomes an issue in one of the following two diametrically differing circumstances:
1. Depriving food and water from profoundly cognitively disabled persons like Terri who are not otherwise dying, a process that causes death by dehydration over a period of 10-14 days. As I will illustrate below, this may cause great suffering.
2. Not forcing food and water upon patients who have stopped eating and drinking as part of the natural dying process. This typically occurs, for example, at the end stages of cancer when patients often refuse nourishment because the disease has distorted their senses of hunger and thirst. In these situations, being deprived of unwanted food and water when the body is already shutting down does not cause a painful death.
Advocates who argue that it is appropriate to dehydrate cognitively disabled people often sow confusion about the suffering such patients may experience by inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, blurring the difference between these two distinct situations.
.....
"When I conducted research on this question in preparation for writing my book Forced Exit, I asked St. Louis neurologist William Burke these very questions. Here is what he told me:
"A conscious [cognitively disabled] person would feel it just as you or I would. They will go into seizures. Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucus membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining. They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death." Dr. Burke opposes removing feeding tubes from cognitively disabled people and so some might dismiss his opinion as biased. But Minnesota neurologist Ronald Cranford's pro-dehydration testimony in the Robert Wendland case — Cranford also testified that Terri's feeding tube should be removed — supports much of what Dr. Burke asserted. While Cranford called seizures "rare," his detailed description of the dehydration process reveals its gruesome reality:
After seven to nine days [from commencing dehydration] they begin to lose all fluids in the body, a lot of fluids in the body. And their blood pressure starts to go down. When their blood pressure goes down, their heart rate goes up. . . . Their respiration may increase and then . . . the blood is shunted to the central part of the body from the periphery of the body. So, that usually two to three days prior to death, sometimes four days, the hands and the feet become extremely cold. They become mottled. That is you look at the hands and they have a bluish appearance. And the mouth dries a great deal, and the eyes dry a great deal and other parts of the body become mottled. And that is because the blood is now so low in the system it's shunted to the heart and other visceral organs and away from the periphery of the body . . .
Most of the time, we never know for sure what a starved or dehydrated person experiences. But in at least one case — that of a young woman who had her feeding tube removed for eight days and lived to tell the tale — we have direct evidence of the agony that forced dehydration may cause.
"
Thanks for sending it.