It was maybe a rhetorical question but it stumped me. Would I treat my dog the way her husband is prepared to treat Terri Schiavo, letting her die by denying her food and water?
The question has nagged at me ever since it was raised last week, when I last wrote about this interminable case.
So I went looking for answers. I've come back with the conclusion that my dog has nothing to do with it - and that some people who would do anything to keep Schiavo alive have ignored or twisted commonly accepted medical fact and practice.
There is nothing unusual about denying medical treatment to the terminally ill who don't want their lives prolonged. Withholding food and water is one way to accommodate them.
Nor is there anything unusual about removing a feeding tube once doctors and families have decided that the patient isn't going to get better. Tube removals happen about once a month at Tampa's LifePath Hospice and Palliative Care, according to Dr. Ronald Schonwetter, the hospice's chief medical officer.
And contrary to what you might think, denying food and water is not a brutal way to die. Instead, it is "one of the most comfortable ways to die," Schonwetter says. "It is the natural way to let body systems shut down."
If you don't believe him, then listen to Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.
"Many people who have advanced diseases like cancer stop eating. When you talk to those patients and say, "Aren't you suffering?' they say, "No. I'm not hungry. I'm not thirsty."'
Instead, they seem to fade away, lapsing into unconsciousness if they aren't, like Terri Schiavo, already there. Once unconscious, patients are incapable of feeling any discomfort.
These are facts.
But then, oh, comes the fury.
You get the feeling from the Schiavo case that this is virgin territory, a terrible saga never seen before.
That is not true.
The case is similar to that of Nancy Cruzan, a young Missouri woman whose parents fought the state for three years for permission to pull her feeding tube.
Like Schiavo, Cruzan was in a persistent vegetative state, the result of injuries from a car wreck in 1983.
Cruzan also had those trademark fluttering open eyes that some people have used as proof of Schiavo's relative health, but which outside doctors say are only evidence of a bodily reflex.
And as with Schiavo, the crusade to save Cruzan was taken up by some in the right-to-life movement. Toward the end, Operation Rescue even stormed the clinic where Cruzan lay. She died in 1990, 12 days after a judge said her feeding tube could be removed.
Six years later, there was another death in the Cruzan family. Her father, Joe, committed suicide. The hounding by his critics also had an effect, said Dr. Miles, who knew Cruzan slightly. The years of fighting had worn down the man. "They were around the hospital every day. He was trying to do the best by his daughter, and they were calling him a murderer," Miles said.
Now Michael Schiavo stands where Joe Cruzan once stood.
I cannot imagine the pressure. I do know that strangers pushing their own political and religious agendas have no place in the private struggle pitting Schiavo against his wife's parents. Let those strangers look to their own families, their own stories when the people they love come to die. Some of those people will be counted in another statistic Miles provided.
More than 2-million people will die in this country this year, he said. Many will come to a point in their care when a decision is made to withhold or withdraw treatment in the name of love and mercy. Decisions like the one involving Terri Schiavo - her feeding tube is to be withdrawn on Oct. 15 - are made daily.
You can certainly call the decision to pull the tube heart-wrenching. But you cannot call it murder. And considering the means to be used, you cannot even call it extraordinary.
