It is so easy to theorize about what you would do. What if you were on life support with the prospect of spending the rest of a long life as a quadriplegic on a ventilator.  Would you say “good bye” to your wife who is carrying your unborn child and ask them to turn off the vent?

That is exactly what Tim Bowers did. Click here for the telling of the story.

Just over a week ago Bowers was hunting and fell sixteen feet to the ground from a deer stand. He fractured three vertebrae and damaged his spinal cord. The medical team advised his family that he would be paralyzed from the shoulders down and probably dependent on machines to breathe for him for the rest of his life. The family wanted to see if the patient could participate in the decision-making process.

“Do you want this?”

When he woke up from the sedatives that had kept him unconscious he could not speak but could answer yes-and-no questions. “Do you want this?” they asked, meaning “Do you want to be kept alive on this machine?” He shook his head “No.” They removed him from the ventilator and he died a day after the accident.

Well. Well?

This is what we in the medical community have been advocating. NOT that people be allowed to die. What we want is for patients to be involved in the decision-making that might end his or her life. They woke Bowers up and asked and he essentially said, “Let me die.”

As soon as I read this story I thought, “I know many paralyzed people on vents who might say he made the wrong decision.” Think Stephen Hawking.  Sure enough I found one blogger who is paralyzed who took issue with how this case was handled.

Perhaps the decision came too soon after the injury. Law professor Thaddeus Pope wonders whether Bowers had “sufficient decision making capacity at the time he made the decision?” In states where physician assisted suicide is legal there is a waiting period from the first request for life-ending medication to a second and final request. Pope asks whether or not Bowers was fully informed about the “options and possibilities of life as a paralyzed individual.”

Give a little time

I tend to agree. Give a little time. If the patient persists in his request to be taken off the machine, by all means, comply.

Years ago I was called to the beside of a heavily sedated man on a ventilator after a heart attack. His wife explained that he had been on a vent before with his heart condition and wrote a living will so he would never be on a breathing machine again. I told the ICU nurse about my conversation and she said, “It is too soon to think about that.”

Well, he was able to get off the vent and out of ICU. I visited him a few days later. He was walking around his hospital room gathering things as he prepared for a transfer to another hospital to have a defibrillator implanted in his chest. I asked him, “How do you feel about being on a ventilator again?”

He said, “I am so glad they did?”

There you go.