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This is why I have on multiple occasions told people “I know it sounds stupid but if I’m ever in a coma, do not dare pull the fucking plug on me without an FMRI
by techdragon 4y ago
This is why I have on multiple occasions told people “I know it sounds stupid but if I’m ever in a coma, do not dare pull the fucking plug on me without an FMRI scan to look for any brain response to the outside world”
I can only imagine how much it could suck to be like this, but the idea of being conscious and realising that I have no way to tell them I’m “in here” while they assume I’m never going to recover and pull the plug, slowly dying of dehydration or hypoxia, that is fucking Nightmare Fuel with a capital N capital F, as in No Fucking Way I ever want that to happen.
I have made it clear on multiple occasions that I don’t care what you do once I’m definitely dead, but if you don’t make fucking sure to the best of science’s ability to check,
… not just accepting the doctor saying I’m not responsive and I’m probably gone… if there’s an afterlife I will haunt them, If not I want them to know how much I disapprove and wish their children and children’s children will look upon the decision to not even check I’m alive with the utmost disapproval.
It’s not fucking hard to check if there’s any brain activity in response to talking or touching or opening eyelids and holding things up in front of them… the alternative feels too monstrous to contemplate. We don’t exactly have dozens of stable coma patients who aren’t already likely to die from other issues related to injuries, etc… it really should be mandatory for stable coma patients to be rigorously scanned to make sure we aren’t accidentally murdering people like this…
Also in case anyone mistakes my phrasing as some sort of pro-life or anti-suicide thing… their body their choise… and I also fully support the right of any locked in person (among many other miserable conditions that also seem fair to allow medical suicide for) to say “fuck it, I’m out, this isn’t living” and be allowed medically assisted suicide, but they at least deserve to choose that to themselves. Hell.. I know I’d want the choice if I was in their shoes. Anyone that thinks someone should be forced to live like that should get their head examined.
- Retric 4y agoBeing stuck without interacting with the physical world for years seems like a much worse situation.
- techdragon 4y agoHence a rapid edit about my opinions regarding medical suicide.
- Nzen 4y agoThat's why I filled out my Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment so they don't keep my meat on life-support for more than a limited period.
- karamanolev 4y agoIf you're really locked in, wouldn't you be going completely mad after only a few days or weeks? I approve of the idea to really make sure the person is brain dead, but how would you feel to be living locked in for months, years? How do they decide if you want mercy and for this to be done vs continue fighting to get back?
- techdragon 4y agoHence the quick edit to clarify a very important secondary opinion regarding medically assisted suicide. Also I didn’t feel it necessarily to mention, but there are established protocols for communication with locked in patients. Effectively you explain to them you know they are locked in and work to develop any effective feedback loop, be it brain wave biofeedback, blinking, or anything else. Once you can reliably ask yes no questions (and trust you aren’t miss interpreting the patient) you can eventually get to important questions like “do you want to live like this?”
- Bombthecat 4y agoBut to who or what are you talking? Are you talking to the conscious or subconscious?
- themitigating 4y agoI would tell people to kill me instantly. Imagine just looking foward with no interaction and just your thoughts? I'd go insane and right now I'm thinking of those in comas. Am I weird that I think suffering past a certain level is worse than death?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wildpeaks 4y agoMore horrifying than being stuck in your thoughts, imagine having a cramp or pain you can't do anything about nor ask for help.
- biohacker85 4y agoBeing unable to scratch an itch is bad enough.
- jamiek88 4y agoI can get used to a pain and touching it doesn’t really help but an itch oooh boy drive me mad, probably because I knew it’ll feel so good in the short term at least!
- wahern 4y agoThere have been people with persistent itches that scratch, sometimes subconsciously, in their sleep, etc, until they hit bone or an internal organ, or both, like their brain: https://www.npr.org/2008/06/24/91852486/the-mystery-and-power-of-the-itch https://www.npr.org/2008/06/24/91852486/the-mystery-and-powe... The itch-scratch reflex is mighty powerful.
- taneq 4y agoYeah, nope, I read that years ago and it’s still one of the more horrifying things I’ve read.
- klondike_ 4y ago
- aeturnum 4y agoWhy would your organs become less 'fresh' if you are stable but appear to be in a vegetative state? I understand being worried about people taking advantage of disabled (perhaps temporarily) folks - but I don't think there's a ticking clock issue here?
- klondike_ 4y agoIf you're already (physically) dead by the time you arrive at the hospital, the chances of successfully harvesting a working organ are low. Thus, organ harvesters prefer patients who are physically alive but brain dead. Organ donor status basically gives them permission to harvest your still-beating heart.
- Freak_NL 4y agoGood. I hope it's of use to someone; I won't be needing it any longer at that point, being brain dead and all.
- loonster 4y agoThe problem isnt if you are actually brain dead. The problem is if you just appear to be brain dead. Organ harvesting is done without the aid of anaesthetic.
- aeturnum 4y ago> Organ donor status basically gives them permission to harvest your still-beating heart. The 'ticking clock' scenario you outlined makes no sense and now you're just spreading scare mongering.
- robbiep 4y agoThat’s absolute horse shit, you are grossly misinformed about the process of organ donation
- dusted 4y agoSoo... What's next when they've determined that you're conscious ? How is being trapped inside your head, potentially forever less of a nightmare scenario? I'll go the opposite "If you detect I'm conscious, kill me asap!"
- ALittleLight 4y agoWhy not "If you detect I'm conscious figure out a method of communication and ask me if I want to die"?
- HWR_14 4y agoIn many places there is no way to kill someone ASAP. Just to let them starve and dehydrate until they die. But if they can detect I'm thinking, they can detect at least binary differences between my mental state. Which means that I can communicate somehow.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Just to let them starve and dehydrate until they die. It's hard to do both of those things; you will die of dehydration before hunger is more than an inconvenience.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rightbyte 4y ago
- lowbloodsugar 4y agoComplete Locked-In Syndrome? No, fucking kill me.
- notfed 4y ago> slowly dying of dehydration or hypoxia This is a fair point, and for me I would accept the solution of massive doses of diamorphine.
- jamiek88 4y agoOr just a slightly too high dose of fent.
- orangepurple 4y ago150 years ago premature burial was one of the greatest fears of many people. George Washington famously feared premature burial. While on his deathbed in 1799, he instructed his personal secretary Tobias Lear to make sure he was dead before he was buried: “Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” Washington ushered in an era of taphophobia, or fear of premature burial. During the 19th century, popular books and magazines promoted the idea that many people were buried alive. They reported tales of bloody shrouds, gnawed fingers and horribly contorted bodies inside their coffins. “Less than 150 years ago many medical practitioners freely admitted to being uncertain whether their patients were dead or alive,” wrote Jan Bondeson in Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, published in 2002. https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/when-fears-of-premature-burial-stalked-the-land/ https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/when-fears-of-pr...
- lisper 4y agoSafety coffins, which had various mechanisms for signaling if you woke up inside of one, were in vogue for quite a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
- smeej 4y agoPopes are still hit on the head with a hammer to make sure they're dead, though it's mostly just ritual at this point. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/3515/ancient-tradition-for-confirming-popes-death https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/3515/ancient-traditi...
- devoutsalsa 4y agosmack “If he wasn’t dead before, he is now!”
- tomcam 4y agoIt’s actually a silver hammer. A certain Beatles tune comes to mind
- 4y ago
- version_five 4y ago> The medical team gave her an EEG—placing sensors on her head to monitor her brain’s electrical activity—while they asked her to “keep opening and closing your right hand.” Then they asked her to “stop opening and closing your right hand.” Even though her hands themselves didn’t move, her brain’s activity patterns differed between the two commands. A eeg is afaik done as a matter of course in these situations. Fmri is not realistic or necessarily
- sva_ 4y agoI once pondered upon what I would consider to still "be alive". Some of these people who are in a coma can, as has been shown, still hear sound and react or even answer by activating certain brain regions which can be measured. But what if you can't hear anymore? It doesn't seem to imply you're dead. For instance, I could imagine, purely hypothetically, that someone could use your sense of touch to input a bit-pattern or even Morsecode to initiate communication, to which one might be able to react by thinking (communicate back). Of course, that seems highly impractical and unlikely to happen, but it is an interesting meditation to contemplate what one would consider for themselves to "be alive".
- biohacker85 4y agoThis reminds me of a joke I once saw acted out on Spanish television. A proud father is at the hospital waiting for his son to be born. The doctor comes out and says, "I'm sorry sir but it seems your son will be born without feet." The father answers "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." The doctor comes out a few minutes later "I'm sorry sir but it seems your son will be born without legs." The father continues "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." The doctor comes out again "I'm sorry sir but your son will be born without arms or hands." The father again says "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." The doctor comes out again "I'm sorry sir but your son will be born without a torso, and will be blind and mute." The father again maintains "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." At last the doctor comes out cradling an ear--"Sir I present your son". The father proclaims " My son! I love you!" The doctor responds "I'm sorry sir, your son is deaf."
- Buttons840 4y agoIf someone is in a coma and pulling the plug would take days to kill them, they should euthanize them. Either way the person will die, but euthanasia speeds up the process and helps if they are still conscious in there somewhere. It's a weird place where we don't consider it killing to let a helpless body starve, but we do consider it killing to inject something that ends things quickly. Both sound like killing to me, and both are ok in some situations.
- HideousKojima 4y agoYou seriously don't see a moral difference between taking active action to end someone's life vs. failing to take an action that will keep someone alive? That's your basic trolley problem
- sonthonax 4y agoNo, it’s petty minded high-school philosophy to pretend that starving a paraplegic is morally speaking better than euthanising them with morphine. There are endless things that distance this from the trolley problem, but mainly starving someone to death isn’t inaction, it’s a conscious clinical choice. It’s utterly bizarre in my mind that is what the USA settled on as a grotesque compromise. Particularly so because outside the medical setting this would still be homicide by starvation.
- 93po 4y agoExactly. Having a duty of care for someone and deliberately not providing that care with the intention of killing them is making you just as complicit in their death as euthanasia.
- sonthonax 4y agoFurthermore it's not inaction, in order to starve someone to death you have to get a lawyer and a judge to sign the death warrant. Pretending this is ethical is palming off the moral responsibility to some medical-tech who refills the feeding tube.
- marcus0x62 4y agoSo you would rather be stuck in a state where you are aware of your surroundings but have no way to communicate with the outside world for potentially years or decades than suffer for minutes to a few days at the most? You and I have very, very, different definitions of “nightmare fuel.”
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoYea, this is assuming OP it isn’t in a constant state of pain. What if - being in a conscious coma is worse than dying? What if it isn’t a dream-like wonder of your own world? What if you lay there and you can’t dream? You can’t sleep, you can’t move, you feel everything, you can’t focus or meditate, you just lie there is permanent torture that you can’t stop. I don’t know why people imagine the cleanest possible scenario for their fantasy play throughs. At least imagine the dirty murky ones if you refuse to imagine the worst case. Something I teach with self-defense is ”Ok, you have made peace with yourself that if a 6’4 meth addled line backer breaks in to your house in a rage, you are morally checked out to end them - now what about a pregnant 14yo girl and you can’t see her hands? Maybe, consider your best first move to be asking them to leave?” … don’t be absolute with anything that you plan for.
- hosh 4y agoYou might be able to simulate that with psychedelics, meditation, or perhaps if they ever figure out how to reliably induce specific states with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. Then someone can make a choice. I’ve had experiences where I was aware of people and what was going on, but from the outside, it looks like I am passed out. It wasn’t really that bad. I know of others who experience what is typically called “sleep paralysis”. It often comes with hallucinations and night terrors.
- boringg 4y agoHonestly these both are variations of nightmares. Neither is anything less than a full blown nightmare.
- 4y ago
- rideg 4y ago“Also in case anyone mistakes my phrasing as some sort of pro-life or anti-suicide thing… their body their choise…” - applying a similar logic wouldn’t it fair to say: Their equipment, their choice?
- tsimionescu 4y agoYou can't seriously equate the right of one person to decide what happens with their own body to property rights of a hospital, can you?
- kingkawn 4y agoHow long do you think you would be you in that state?
- Waterluvian 4y agoI’m so surprised because I assumed you were arguing the opposite. It’s nightmare fuel to be trapped consciously in my body.
- phonepostingsux 4y ago"I have no mouth, and I must scream."
- russdill 4y agoI think you are confusing persistent vegetative state and coma. We don't pull the plug just because someone is in a coma
- wruza 4y agoSomething in your comment hints that you will probably change your mind after a short while in a coma.
- roflyear 4y agoThis is why I'd want the plug pulled on me immediately.
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoConversely, I've told people that they are absolutely not to keep me on life support for months and years. If there's no prognosis for me waking up within a couple weeks, let me die. Don't risk trapping me in an endless, unendurable hell.
- beaker52 4y agoI like to imagine that if I were in that state that my wife would see to it that I get an sizeable administration of intravenous DMT. If I can’t wake in this dimension, let me dream another.