Oct '09
Death Panel
Don’t you just love the idea of a death panel?
Walking in the shoes of those who believe this sort of thing I see faceless automatons with policy books (if we’re lucky) evaluating the facts and only the facts. Unlike Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where quality is the central question, no life reflects any quality; all life is simply a quantity. Anything otherwise brings terror. It isn’t even that hard to understand. Our greatest fears are usually fictional, usually those things that never happen and the ones that do turn out to be less than that fearful.
But sitting on my seat, in my body, I am Phaedrus. I am part of the death panel. And, I am not alone. Frankly, my experience is demeaned when it is labeled heartless and mechanical. My experience was anything but heartless.
During my last month of seminary, I got a call from Oklahoma that my father was in serious condition and not expected to pull through. A friend worked as a flight attendant for United and got me a family ticket for cheap or I wouldn’t have gone to be with him. When I got there he was incoherent. He had been lucid three hours before. We transferred him to a very modern facility in Tulsa and stabilized him.
Every few minutes he would awaken yelling at the top of his lungs. None of us could understand anything he said. The duty nurse said this isn’t unusual for someone in his condition. He had three life threatening illnesses or conditions that had been kept in balance with an odd cocktail of medications. One, he had heart disease or rather cardiovascular disease. Two, he was diabetic and tended to getting infections. Three, he had lost a leg to vascular restriction due to smoking which compounded his cardiovascular difficulties. This episode resulted from a surgery he had performed in Joplin, Missouri in which three toes on his right foot had been removed. He was dependent on someone bringing his medication. My cousin was supposed to take care of him and she did not come one evening. The next day he went into the hospital and I flew down.
That second day in the facility in Tulsa his doctor sat with me and the new attending nurse and we discussed his condition. My father and I had discussed this very eventuality but he had no living will. Friends were calling me all day begging me to make the right choice. Though in this case, there was no choice. When one makes a choice and it doesn’t work, one chooses again. No, this required a decision. When one makes a decision one cuts off other choices. There is a clear distinction.
As a death panel member I asked for help. The doctor had been in the same situation ten months before and decided to let nature take its course with his father. The nurse said that not a week goes by but that an equally tragic situation arises. I had two hours to decide. The nurse talked to me about life, living, and forgiveness. For two and a half hours, I twisted every fiber of my being to squeeze every ounce of forgiveness out of it. My relationship with my father had been difficult. My father had been difficult for everyone. I knew what I needed to do, but my decision needed to be clear of any animosity. I would need to forgive myself later.
I decided for nature. I decided that all the technology could keep my father alive but could never hope to give him his life back. I decided on what we had discussed so many times and how all those friends of his hoped. It took a while, but he died right there and I was the one who had to make the final decision.
So when I see those signs denouncing death panels I’m taken back to that night when I had to be the death panel, when I had to trust my own conscience, when I had only my experience and that of many witnesses to rely on. It would have been so much better if he had met with what THEY want to call death panels but which are, in fact, end of life planning teams which include the person, the family, and the physician. I know when a person is that fearful, they must be treated carefully.
I wonder if any one of them would want to trade places? I wonder if we could do one of those Harry Potter things and have them live my memory?
