Marian was paralysed after a stroke in 1983 when she was 36 years old. Doctors told her parents that she was in PVS and would always be "a cabbage." They discussed, in her presence, withdrawing her food and fluids so she would die. Her parents refused. Marian was transferred to the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability in 1990, and subsequently to a Leonard Cheshire Home, where she lived happily until her death in 1994.
A post-mortem revealed that Marian had never been in PVS. Instead she had Locked-In syndrome, a condition in which the person cannot move or communicate but remains fully conscious and aware. Marian's mother says the doctors "stood by her hospital bed and told us we should live our lives and accept that she was dead. She would have heard everything."
Note that the doctors stated that Marian was "already dead" before the planned withdrawal of food and fluids. It needs to be argued in the strongest possible terms that living with a profound disability is not tantamount to death, and that most disabled people need protection from the harm of being assumed to be "as good as dead."
It should be noted here that the British Medical Association have argued that cases of withholding or withdrawing food and fluids should be extended to people with advanced dementia, or who have had a severe stroke.