[NautiNurse]

I agree with sarasmon on all points. It appears your sister-in-law was terminally ill, and required advanced life support. A feeding tube is not considered advanced life support. Your brother made a difficult and agonizing decision. Beyond that, I do not know further details. I would imagine that your sister-in-law and your brother tried to fight the cancer when it was originally diagnosed.

On the other hand, Terri Schiavo is not terminally ill, nor does she require advanced life support. Thanks to her husband, she has not received therapy of any type in an attempt to improve her capabilities for thirteen years, despite a $750,000 award for that stated purpose. Doubting Michael Schiavo's devotion to Terri is very, very easy. He has been engaged to marry another woman for seven years, and they have a child together.

[Brandon]

I agree with sarasmon on all points. It appears your sister-in-law was terminally ill, and required advanced life support. A feeding tube is not considered advanced life support.

I am not going to get into who is right in this case, but the statement quoted above is incorrect.

First, the term at issue is not "advanced life support" -- it is "life sustaining treament". Life sustaining treatment is a broad category of interventions, ranging from intense use of ventillators, all the way down to artificial nutrition -- which is what this woman is receiving.

Hospitals in this country withdraw or withhold life sustaining treatment -- including artificial nutrition -- every single day or the year, when the case has been found to be hopeless. Best case, it is done because of the known wishes of the patient. Next-best-case, it is done because the people who know the patient well inform the physicians of what the patient would probably say if she were able to express her wishes. Last ditch case, when the patient lacks decision-making capacity, and there is no surrogate decisionmaker available, the physicians take the hopeless cases to the hospital Ethics Committee for a decision.

This may or may not be what this woman would have chosen for herself; I wouldn't know. I do know, from nearly 20 years experience in hospital administration, that this particular situation is every healthcare provider's nightmare: the patient unable to give her opinion, and close family members in bitter disagreement over what she would say if they were able to ask her. And I'm extremely confident that no healthcare provider would consider pulling life sustaining treatment, if they thought there was the slightest chance that the act could be construed as murder (as some on this thread have suggested).

My suggestion: Pray for the patient, that whichever way it works out, life or death, her suffering not be prolonged, and that her various family members find a way to heal the pain in their hearts.

[ican'tbelieveit]

please reference 112.

[Theodore R.]

I find it hard to believe that the courts would unilaterally allow the guy to "kill his wife".

Under FL law, cannot a man divorce a wife confined to a nursing home? Therefore, he cannot be engaged as such, as he is not divorced. He has not divorced her undoubtedly because there a dollar signs in his head. Or perhaps he has such hatred for her and the in-laws that he deliberately stayed "married" so as to reach his current "15 minutes of fame."