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| How Faith Saved the Atheist |
| 2006-07-21 |
| by Pamela R. Winnick, Wall Street Journal This story fits in with Dr. Steve's commentary in the discussion thread on the NOLA doctors charged with snuffing patients during Hurricane Katrina. A medical resident--we called her "Dr. Death"--at the Intensive Care Unit at Long Island's North Shore Hospital chased us down the hallway. "Your husband wants to die," she told my mother, again. Just minutes before I had asked her to leave us alone. "He can't even talk," I reminded her. "He motioned with his hands when we tried to put in the feeding tube," she said. Not exactly informed consent, I pointed out as we turned our backs on her and walked down the hallway, trying to avert our eyes from the other patients in the ICU that night, each of them at various points in the so-called "twilight zone" between life and death. Afflicted with asbestos-related lung cancer, my father, Louis Winnick, was rushed into the ICU in late May after a blood clot nearly killed him. The next day, my husband and I raced to New York from Pittsburgh. I packed enough work and knitting for what might be an extended stay, but I also put in a suit for what I was certain would be my father's imminent funeral. Still, he wasn't dead yet. And we had no intention of precipitating the inevitable. "Dr. Death" was just one of several. A new resident appeared the next day, this one a bit more diplomatic but again urging us to allow my father to "die with dignity." And the next day came yet another, who opened with the words, "We're getting mixed messages from your family," before I shut him up. I've written extensively about practice of bioethics--which, for the most part, I do not find especially ethical--but never did I dream that our moral compass had gone this far askew. My father, 85, was heading ineluctably toward death. Though unconscious, his brain, as far as anyone could tell, had not been touched by either the cancer or the blood clot. He was not in a "persistent vegetative state" (itself a phrase subject to broad interpretation), that magic point at which family members are required to pull the plug--or risk the accusation that they are right-wing Christians. I complained about all the death-with-dignity pressure to my father's doctor, an Orthodox Jew, who said that his religion forbids the termination of care but that he would be perfectly willing to "look the other way" if we wanted my father to die. We didn't. Then a light bulb went off in my head. We could devise a strategy to fend off the death-happy residents: We would tell them we were Orthodox Jews. My little ruse worked. During the few days after I announced this faux fact, it was as though an invisible fence had been drawn around my mother, my sister and me. No one dared mutter that hateful phrase "death with dignity." Though my father was born to an Orthodox Jewish family, he is an avowed atheist who long ago had rejected his parents' ways. As I sat in the ICU, blips on the various screens the only proof that my father was alive, the irony struck me: My father, who had long ago rejected Orthodox Judaism, was now under its protection. As though to confirm this, there came a series of miracles. Just a week after he was rushed to ICU, my father was pronounced well enough to be moved out of the unit into North Shore's long-term respiratory care unit. A day later he was off the respirator, able to breathe on his own. He still mostly slept, but then he began to awaken for minutes at a time, at first groggy, but soon he was as alert (and funny) as ever. A day later, we walked in to find him sitting upright in a chair, reading the New York Times. . . . On Father's Day, we packed my father's hospital room: his wife, daughters, grandchildren, each of us regaling him with our successes large and small. "Life's not so bad, after all," the atheist said. I wanted to go back to ICU, find Dr. Death, drag her to my father's room and say: "This is the life you wanted to end." But if I'm really to be a person of faith, I'll have to tackle forgiveness. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #4 Steve, every profession has its bad apples. If it's any consolation, yours has fewer than most. Given the temptations available to doctors, that is actually quite a compliment. |
| Posted by: mac 2006-07-21 11:58 |
| #3 Residents like that wouldn't last very long around me. Again, there's a difference between euthanasia and hospice care, killing a patient and comfort care. When the situation is truly hopeless, we'll work with families to help make patients comfortable. But that's the families' decision and not ours. It's never ours. I never, ever want patients and families to worry whether I wear the white coat of a healer or the black hood of an executioner. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2006-07-21 11:18 |
| #2 I noticed that, too. Irony meter pegged at "off-scale high." |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-07-21 11:03 |
| #1 A day later, we walked in to find him sitting upright in a chair, reading the New York Times. Just like the doctors who anted to kill him |
| Posted by: JFM 2006-07-21 09:45 |