A Genuine Fear of Mine
As has become more than habitual for me lately, it's quite early in the day and I'm very much so awake (having been awake all of the previous night and most of the day before). I was watching music videos on Youtube and for some reason or another I watched the Metallica video for "One", this is the first time I've ever seen the video and while I like the song, and have heard it many times I never really put much thought into the lyrics. The video features clips from the movie "Johnny Got His Gun", based on a novel written on World War I.
The novel was written by a man named Dalton Trumbo after reading an article about a visit by the Prince of Wales to a Canadian hospital to see a soldier that had lost all of his limbs, his hearing, his speech, sight, and nose during the war. He wrote about what it must be like to be a man trapped in his own body, and completely and utterly unable to move or communicate with the outside world. Visit here for an excerpt from the book. The term for the medical condition is "locked-in syndrom" and is most often the result of a sever stroke.
Seriously, I could not imagine being forced to live like a piece of meat with no way to communicate with the outside world, or see, or do anything at all. Cases like this make me very pro-assisted suicide. I can't think of a single person I've ever met in my life that would consider this a form of quality life. For all intents and purposes a person in this condition is dead. The patient in the book was kept alive by tracheotomy and tube feeding, what little muscles were left in the body I would imagine atrophied rather quickly without stimulus or other movement, and the mind was left to itself to witness the horror and trauma of the body. Gathering from the excerpt and what I read of it on Wikipedia the medical staff had decided he was incapable of feeling or thinking, which turned out to be not true in the least bit. Later in the novel he tries to Morose Code out "Kill me" and even then was denied death.
The thought of forced life on a thinking corpse just really sends chills through my spine. Seriously.
The novel was written by a man named Dalton Trumbo after reading an article about a visit by the Prince of Wales to a Canadian hospital to see a soldier that had lost all of his limbs, his hearing, his speech, sight, and nose during the war. He wrote about what it must be like to be a man trapped in his own body, and completely and utterly unable to move or communicate with the outside world. Visit here for an excerpt from the book. The term for the medical condition is "locked-in syndrom" and is most often the result of a sever stroke.
Seriously, I could not imagine being forced to live like a piece of meat with no way to communicate with the outside world, or see, or do anything at all. Cases like this make me very pro-assisted suicide. I can't think of a single person I've ever met in my life that would consider this a form of quality life. For all intents and purposes a person in this condition is dead. The patient in the book was kept alive by tracheotomy and tube feeding, what little muscles were left in the body I would imagine atrophied rather quickly without stimulus or other movement, and the mind was left to itself to witness the horror and trauma of the body. Gathering from the excerpt and what I read of it on Wikipedia the medical staff had decided he was incapable of feeling or thinking, which turned out to be not true in the least bit. Later in the novel he tries to Morose Code out "Kill me" and even then was denied death.
The thought of forced life on a thinking corpse just really sends chills through my spine. Seriously.