Never mind!
“Thompson’s daughter, Elizabeth “Betsy” Thompson Panici, 38, died in 2002 of an accidental drug overdose, according to the Nashville, Tenn., medical examiner’s office. She had been diagnosed as suffering from a bipolar disorder.
Thompson’s remarks indicated that his daughter had been on life support, although his campaign declined to provide further information, saying the matter was too personal. Panici died on Jan. 30, 2002, six days after being brought unconscious to a hospital emergency room. At the time, then-Sen. Thompson released a statement saying she died of “severe brain injury resulting from cardiac arrest.”
Looks like the plug was pulled.
Sure does, here's a quote from the linked article.
"I am a little bit uncomfortable about that because it's an intensely personal thing," he said. "These things need to be decided by the family, and I was at that bedside, and I had to make those decisions with the rest of my family."
Was it extraordinary means that were stopped or was she starved to death?
I’ll not judge him. We’re going through this very same thing in my family right now.
Just PRAY this NEVER happens to you or someone you love. You have NO idea what this is like and how hard these decisions are for parents and/or spouses.
I will tell you this: my relatives husband curses the day that he revived her when he found her, clinically dead. (He’s a Fireman. He couldn’t NOT try to save her.)
Try living with that; bringing someone you love back to “life” only to sentence them to a living Hell.
Granted, each case is different, and I still think Mr. Schaivo is a total JERK who could’ve let Teri live because her parents very muchso wanted to care for her, but ‘til you’ve been there, it’s really hard to see the other side.
Again, I wouldn’t wish these decisions upon my worst enemy.
Whatever, it would have been her husband's call.
Pulling the plug on someone who cannot even breathe for themselves and is brain dead is pretty different from starving a person to death. Terri was not on life supports, just food and water through a feeding tube.
This sounds like the comment of someone who hasn't been closely involved in the decisions surrounding the death of a loved one.
People die. Get over it.
With our medical capabilities we can keep dying people alive well beyond reason. They're going to die. All of the "miracles of science" that are applied to prolonging their "life" (that's in quotes because someone in a terminal coma doesn't have a life) are ridiculous and futile. But watching over them through that painful process is hardly "pulling the plug."
Yet it entails a lot of the same emotional and moral choices.
Aren't we supposed to go find someone (even a crack pot pseudo scientist) to try some incredibly experinmental (and incredibly expensive) procedure to "save" the person who all the instruments say is brain dead? If you don't do that, won't you be accuse of "pulling the plug?"
My mother died a couple of years ago, several weeks after suffering a massive stroke. She was conscious and coherent, though in pain, when she got to the hospital and the doctors (some of the best in the world) performed surgery to try to save her life. When they got into her brain they found much more damage and a much more serious situation than they could possibly cope with, no matter what they did. She never regained conscousness.
I sat with her for 4 days after arriving from my home far away from where my parents lived. I waited to come for nearly 10 days because I knew what was happening, based on years of working on ambulances in New York City and the surrounding area. She was being sustained by all of the "marvels" of modern medicine. Nothing was cut, pulled or witheld.
And she died.
She would have died two weeks earlier without the "extrodianiary care" provide by Stanford University Hospital, but our society demands that we "never give up" in these situations. That's to allow for the one in a million who recovers from these sorts of situations against all of the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the priests of Hypocratese.
Besides, the insurance company will pick up the bill. And if they won't Hillary will.
Bottom line, I'd recommend those trying to hack at Fred over this comment with no better evidence than presented in the article should read Matthew, chapter 7.
Then I'd recommend that they spend a year or two working with people in hospice care. Then they might be in a position to talk about this situation and the choices (or non choices) others have made.