Facebook

Twitter

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Vegetative Mock Trial: An All-Too-Real Life and Death Scenario


Miracle Girl: Vegetative Mock Trial: An All-Too-Real Life and Death Scenario

Should a vegetative wife have her feeding tube removed? That was the question posed by a student mock trial. Yet the issues at stake are far from moot.
Would I have rather have been taken off life support and allowed to die? That's what the student asked me.
Seriously!???
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

1 comment:

  1. hacijy567May 11, 2021 at 9:10 AM

    Papa Murphy strives to improve its customer service, pizza varieties, and taste through Papa Murphy’s Customer Satisfaction Survey.

    Papa Murphy Survey

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for your comment!

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Contact me!

Name

Email *

Message *

Coma Girl

Coma Girl

Not a miracle recovery, but a miracle of modern medicine

In 2013 I fell into a six-week coma and nearly died after I contracted legionella. The Legionnaire's disease was in turn triggered by immunosuppression caused by the prednisone I was taking for my rare autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis.

I suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when the sepsis caused my blood pressure to plummet. I fell into a deep coma. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, as my body was began dying one organ at a time. My doctors told my loved ones to give up hope for my full recovery. They expected me to die, and even if I somehow lived, I would remain a vegetable or at best left so hopelessly brain-damaged that I would never be same. But unbeknownst to them, while they were shining lights in my eyes and shaking their heads, I was telling them in my coma-dream--my secular version of a near-death experience--to leave me alone because I was trying to get back to sleep. I was experiencing what is known as covert cognition, the subject of my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," which appeared in their July/August issue.

But it wasn't a miracle--despite what so many continue to believe--that I recovered so fully. I owe my life not to God, but the miracles of modern medicine, as well as the nature of the watershed-area brain damage I suffered, as I detailed in my article and in this blog.