Owlish Mutterings

Terri Schiavo

Because damn near every blog in existence has posted on this case, I thought I should add my 2 cents. I suspect this has gotten so politicized, it is difficult to get reasonable medical information. Lots of stuff floating around fourth or fifthhand, but mostly worthless. Therefore, I'm not going to guess what the patient's intentions were, or her husband's, or her parents'. I strongly suspect if I knew I was going to be in a similar situation I would not want to live through it.

What it does make clear though, is the need for essentially everyone in the US to have a living will. When I was working at the hospital, every single patient, as part of their admission paperwork, was asked if they had a living will, and if they didn't and wanted to make one, help was provided.

By the way, this MSNBC article claims 85% of americans don't have one. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Update: Downtown Lad posted a picture of the lady's CT scan - just one cut of the full scan, but it got a spontaneous "holy shit" from me. If that is the real deal [the blog doesn't say where it got the x-ray] I want to know what doctor thinks there can be any sort of recovery, and what correspondence school they got their diploma from.

Posted by Owlish at March 21, 2005 08:56 PM | TrackBack