Associated Press photo
Above: Jesse Jackson (I stopped thinking of him as "Reverend" after it was revealed that he had a child by his mistress) joins the circus outside of Terri Schiavo's hospice in Florida today. Below: Jackson with Schiavo's parents, Mary and Bob Schindler. In his misguided, uneducated statements today, Jackson revealed his ignorance of hospice care and of the dying process and his disrepect for the law.
AP photo
Et tu, Jesse?
Jesse Jackson today joined the conga line of those who have injected themselves into the Terri Schiavo case.
"She is being starved to death, she is being dehydrated to death. That's immoral and unnecessary," he said outside of Terri Schiavo's hospice in Florida.
It’s unfortunate that Jesse Jackson is adding his voice to the chorus of ignorance on the Schiavo case.
Rather than listen to what the doctors have to say, people employ a “thought” process that goes something like this: “Gee, if I were denied food or water, I sure would suffer. Therefore, Terri Schiavo must be suffering.”
Except that the consensus of doctors -- people who know what they're talking about -- is that Terri Schiavo is not suffering.
I have some experience in this; I was a hospice nurse in the 1990s. It is routine in hospice nursing, when a patient goes comatose and can no longer swallow, not to give him or her artificial nutrition or hydration. This is not considered “starving them to death” or “dehydrating them to death,” as Jackson put it.
This is called "the natural dying process."
Americans are so far removed from death and dying that they don’t even know what the natural dying process entails. (The natural dying process entails, in a nutshell, eating and drinking less and less until one goes into a coma and can no longer swallow and then dies after some time in the coma. People have died like this for thousands of years, a fact of life that our medical technology has made many, if not most, of us forget.)
Jackson also remarked today, “I feel so passionate about this injustice being done, how unnecessary it is to deny her a feeding tube, water, not even ice to be used for her parched lips. This is a moral issue and it transcends politics and family disputes.”
Jackson was not allowed to see Terri Schiavo – and he shouldn’t have been, because the Schiavo case has been enough of a circus – so his information about her care, I surmise, comes from the likes of those who have compared the hospice in which Terri is dying to Auschwitz.
Part of hospice care is to give oral care; ice usually isn’t used because the melted water from ice can go into the lungs of a person who cannot swallow (this is called “aspiration”). However, oral swabs and petroleum jelly often are used for oral care.
If Jackson knew anything about the dying process or hospice care, he wouldn’t have embarrassed himself today by making the ignorant statements that he made.
And the supposed “injustice” that Jackson railed against? The Schiavo case went from the lower courts of Florida all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. There even was, literally, an act of Congress that kicked the case from the Florida state courts, where it should have stopped, to the federal courts. You can’t get more justice than that.
It’s sad to see Jackson, who has done many good things, throw in with the ignoramuses on the Schiavo case.
And if he felt the need to inject himself into the Schiavo circus so strongly, why in the hell did he wait until the 12th day? (Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was disconnected on March 18. Doctors have expected her to live a week or two without the feeding tube, and Jackson waited 12 days before he joined the circus.)
"Today, we pray for a miracle. We ask God's intervention," Jackson reportedly said today.
Spirituality isn’t about telling God what to do, such as to save us or another from death.
Spirituality is about accepting that which we cannot change and coming to terms with the often painful facts of life and death.
Jackson’s misguided comments today do not serve that purpose, but only serve to increase ignorance and fear. He did not shine a light today, but only cast more shadows.
Shame on him.
9:17:10 PM 
|
|
