STARVING TO DEATH IS NATURAL
After
suffering through cancer, the middle-age woman decided her illness was too much
to bear. Everything she ate, she painfully vomited back up. The prospect of surgery
and a colostomy bag held no appeal. And so against the advice of her doctors
the patient decided to stop eating and drinking. During the next 40 days in
1993 Robert Sullivan of Duke Univ. Medical Center observed her gradual decline,
providing one of the most detailed clinical accounts of starvation and
dehydration.
Instead of feeling pain, the patient
experienced the characteristic sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete
lack of food and water. She was cogent for weeks chatting with her caregivers
in the nursing home and writing letters to family and friends. As her organs finally
failed she slipped painlessly into a coma and died.
In
the evolving saga of Terri Schiavok the prospect of the 41 year old Florida
woman suffering a slow and painful death from starvation has been a galvanizing
force
But medical experts say going with-out
food and water in the last days and weeks of life is as natural as death
itself. The body is equipped with its own resources to adjust to death.
In fact,
eating and drinking during sever illness can be painful because of the demands
it puts on weakened organs.
“What my
patients have told me over the last 25 years is that when they stop eating and
drinking there’s nothing unpleasant about it—in fact, it can be quite blissful
and euphoric,” said Perry Fine, vice president of medical affairs at the
National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization in Arlington, VA “It’s a very
smooth graceful and elegant was to go”.
Schiavo, who
hasn’t had any food or water since March 18, has been in a persistent
vegetative state for 15 years that makes it impossible for her brain to
recognize pain, doctors say.
To be continued…
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.
